Real Vs Virtual: Is COVID-19 Changing The Idea Of Who We Are?
Years ago, as bag-packers, my friend and I used to look at Japanese groups who would come out of their tourist buses, look in the direction of the guides’ stick and click pictures. They made no efforts to explore or walk around. Whether in the colosseum in Rome or in Auschwitz, it was the same. Within one week, they would cover the entire European civilization from the renaissance to the world war. The tourists had been everywhere but also perhaps nowhere. Today, we may be becoming like those tourists who experienced little, processed even lesser and believed they had seen all.
These students didn’t get my point that the virtual world is not anything close to real. It is the unprogrammed in the program that builds understanding of reality by engagement with other people; me telling the students that the surprises and the changes make an experience real, didn’t cut any ice.
This is also a predicament for many psychologists. I have seen Sunit (name changed) get over a bad marriage, a divorce and he is now fighting a painful custody case. The last few sessions he had were online. When I asked him if he felt any difference, after a moment’s silence he said, “I feel safer and anonymous while talking online. My communication, my business is so much online now that it seems more real now. It has become a way of life and I want to continue.” I nodded my head wondering how the new reality would challenge the principles of human behaviour I had learnt long ago at graduate school.
Soon psychologists may have more clients who prefer online to offline.
In the virtual world, we rarely look inward. Interactions with others are more performances and less based on exchanges that the human civilisation is based upon. It is the unpredictable whose presence makes me look inwards and ask certain questions that one can’t do in the virtual world. Knowing, sensing, intuiting has taken a backseat and the tactile, the visual no longer hold.
The physical world we leave behind did create meaning in our lives. It gave us poets, writers, scientists who drew their imagination and inspiration from the sensory world. It is something that the virtual world post-COVID-19 won’t be able to do. It will not create the meaning that Viktor Frankel said makes us truly human and gave us hope. I hope we discover an answer to that sooner than later.
(The author is a professor of Psychology at Amity University. Views expressed are personal.)
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