The easy way to reach out
The device you're reading this on can be pretty handy
This past weekend was my 20th high school reunion. Since not everyone in our small class could attend, just about everyone made a short video and shared it with the rest of us.
I rode the wave of web 2.0 as I grew up, from our high school BBS and ICQ to Friendster and Facebook. As a geriatric millennial, I was among the first to live life online as a teenager. It's fitting that I attended High Technology High School.
It's en vogue right now to dismiss anything that happens through a screen as a waste of time, as vapid and fake. Especially if it’s facilitated by social media.
We know that's not true. The negative impact social media interactions can have — the very real jealousy and feelings of social ostracism — suggest just how powerful this method of connection, or lack of it, can be.
Online relationships count.
My high school was run by the county, so hanging out with my classmates after school wasn't something we could do often. We were connected by the phone. My dad worked from home, so we had like six phone lines. My sister and I spent hours on our shared phone line and I spent hours more on the line we used for dial-up.
Maybe this is why it's been so easy for us to continue to keep in touch despite the even greater distance between most of us. Instead of being a few towns away from each other, there might be an entire country or an ocean between us. We still spend a huge amount of time communicating through online text, punctuated by phone calls and video calls. I still spend hours on the phone, mostly with the same people, only now my sister doesn't have to wait her turn.
I am attached to my phone. I'm obsessed with never letting the battery drop below 60%. I don't feel addicted, though. Am I addicted to talking to my parents? Addicted to checking in with friends who are going through a tough time? Addicted to pictures of my friends kids? Addicted to being on time to a meeting? Addicted to finishing library books before their due dates? Addicted to figuring out where the heck I am because Lisbon's city layout is not the orderly grid of New York?
Thanks to social media (and the people organizing my high school reunion) it's easy to get back in touch with people who've fallen to acquaintance status and who would otherwise be lost from my life. People's lives change and the internet makes it easier to adjust to those life changes by reaching out again or stepping back for a while without completely losing touch.
Sure, most of the people I'm connecting with through the internet most intensely are people I know off-line. Of course, many of my friends are people I met through the internet. And then there are people, like Bob Harrison, who I've never met off-line yet are deeply important to me.
Relationships count, no matter what format they take.
I'm very active in quite a few Facebook groups, of course. I may not know most of the members very well. Just like in the schools I've attended, there's a sense of community and camaraderie, even with the people I barely know. Just like the people I say hello to around the neighborhood without ever learning their names, these almost non-existent relationships mean something. They make the world a place of familiar faces and friendly greetings.
A lot of people are lonely right now. There are welcoming communities out there. There are friendships to develop. There are relationships to rekindle.
We all know the cons of social media and the internet. Let's remember the pros.
If you're not on social media, I highly recommend you still stay in touch with old friends. We kept in touch long before the creation of the internet, so if you're going to opt out of this technology it doesn't mean you have to opt out of maintaining relationships.
Your alumni association has everyone’s addresses and sending a letter is a wonderful option. You can call people from your landline just as well as you can call them over Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp. And you can still send a telegram, which you know would be a delightful novelty to get.
Speaking of dystopian technology, health care is a dangerous business. Not only do care workers face high risk of injuries from the physical labor of care, they also face violence.
Many facilities already have panic buttons. Now one company has developed a wearable panic button.
“According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, workers in healthcare and social services now face the highest rates of workplace violence across all industries.”
I created a private group on Facebook for people providing care work for someone who lives far away from them. If that's you or you know someone in that situation, here's where to find us.
Michael Cholbi shares his thoughts on grief.
I enjoyed this podcast episode on Penny Wincer's book, Tender: The Imperfect Art of Caring. I propose we trade the term "caregiver" for "extra good people." LOL
The care economy is huge. Even if we don't consider the unpaid labor provided by family members, friends, neighbors, and volunteers — and the uncompensated labor of professional care workers. You can learn more and see the stats at Invest in Care. Apologies for how it's branded as a $648B investment opportunity.
Speaking of investments, here’s Nikhil Krishnan take on Amazon’s latest acquisition. Medical care in the US is already notorious for treating its employees like machines, rationing care arbitrarily, and outsourcing everything. Amazon is great at all of those things, so it makes sense to me that they want in on that action.
I also love Nikhil Krishnan’s explanation of medical pricing in the US. The thing that really amazes me is how many people around the world assume US citizens have access to the best medical care in the world. What the US does best is public relations!
[The US actually comes in second place for PR, imo. First place goes to Iceland’s Blue Lagoon, where people pay a lot of money to soak in the wastewater generated by a power plant, ahem, I mean geothermal resource park.]
Nancy Fraser delves into the economics of care work and explains why demanding recognition and compensation for care work is so radical — capitalism only works if it’s extracting more from the system than it puts out, in order to syphon off those huge profits. The uncompensated inputs capitalism erases in order to fraudulently balance the books are care work and other “natural” resources.