Blurred Lives

Covid-19 has blurred useful boundaries in our lives. Here’s how we can make them clear again.

Covid-19 has blurred the boundaries of our lives more than any event since the invention of the internet.

Processes which were already underway — such as remote working, or spending ever more of our time in digital environments — have been accelerated by the pandemic. What was forced upon many of us by Covid-19 has now become accepted as the new standard for living and working.

This has created a sense of entitlement to the apparent benefits of online life, as many of us assume it represents progress. But what has perhaps been easiest and most convenient over the past eighteen months may not be in our best interests, long-term.

Here’s why.

Blurred work and home life

Although most jobs still require a physical presence in a workplace (healthcare, hospitality, catering, manufacturing, construction), home working is the new normal for most workers in the knowledge economy. But what seems like a win-win situation (employees don’t commute, employers scale down office space costs) is actually a ticking time-bomb for our wellbeing and equality.

When we work from home, our home and work life blur together. It becomes hard to set clear boundaries between the two, and we can easily end up with the worst of both worlds. We can’t escape or switch off from work, because we’re often expected to be ‘on call’ as long as we’re at home. Behavioural scientists call this ‘constant partial attention’, and it’s a major source of stress and anxiety. That makes it hard to be present with our families, meaning that they suffer, too.

Research has also shown us that home working compounds existing social inequalities. Women disproportionately bear the responsibility for childcare, chores and home management alongside work. They’re also more likely to choose home working, because of those additional responsibilities, which means less visibility in the office, potentially damaging their career development. Younger and poorer people are less likely to have suitable home working spaces and may be disadvantaged in performance terms versus older, wealthier co-workers.

Blurred place in communities

Spending more time online at home also blurs the sense of our place in groups. This could be our community of co-workers, with the loss of belonging to a culture within our organisation. We miss out on mentoring and learning opportunities — which are most effective when we’re face-to-face with others, sharing attention on the same task. The same goes for creativity and spontaneity in our workplace interactions.

In addition, there’s a blurring of accountability when we’re away from the workplace and our colleagues. We do things at home that we wouldn’t do at work — from slacking and presenteeism, to more serious acts like fraud and theft. Just ask the German investment banker recently convicted of €8m insider trading during lockdown — because no one was watching. His may be an extreme example, but it is indicative of the lack of oversight and blurred sense of ethics that can all too easily happen when we’re away from the workplace community that keeps us in check.

And it isn’t just our colleagues we become separated from. The wider world we encounter commuting — the people we see on trains and buses, or who we carpool with — becomes lost. Without this context and the exposure to diversity in society that it brings, social psychology tells us we risk becoming less tolerant of others and more likely to stereotype.

Many people say that not commuting and being able to live ‘anywhere’ are incredible benefits of remote work, but is that really true? The flipside of the exodus from cities and towns to cheaper, more spacious properties in rural areas is isolation, and loss of real-world social contact with our professional and social communities.

We retreat further and further into a sedentary online world of work, shopping, entertainment, and social media, in which we are at the centre, the masters of our own digital universes. The consequence of this blurring of physical and virtual space is that we become more self-interested and narcissistic.

Blurred personalities

Research tells us that we’re more disinhibited online. We lose a part of our super-ego — the ability to restrain ourselves — when we’re behind a screen. We’re more likely to abuse and troll others, or simply send rude and aggressive emails to our colleagues. Basically, we have less empathy. The more time we spend online, in isolation, the more unpleasant we are likely to be to others, and the more our personalities change for the worse.

What can we do about it?

Despite evidence to show that these many forms of blurring are not good for us — mentally or physically — they have become the norm in 2021. So, how do we try to redress the balance and achieve some clarity in our blurred lives?

We need to begin by finding ways to re-establish helpful boundaries, for instance between work and home. We need to get out and restore our shared identities with others in the communities to which we belong — across work, social, and public spaces.

Perhaps we can start by challenging ourselves to do more outside of the home. We can choose to take a day, two, three or four in the office each week, connecting with others, learning from those richer, real-world experiences, and taking notice of our surroundings as we commute.

We can choose to go to a shop rather than buy something online, and enjoy the exercise and social interaction that comes with that. We can arrange to meet a friend in real life, if possible, rather than having a rushed zoom call on the computer we’ve spent all day working at.

Evidence supports the positive impact that all these actions can have on our wellbeing. But it’s up to us to make choices that will give us clarity over our roles and activities, which the pandemic has blurred.

Now that the worst of Covid-19 has passed, let’s help one another to get back the best of our lives from before.

Let’s help each other to see clearly again.