I agree wholeheartedly. Dissemination of a technology doesn’t seem to primarily be limited by the capacity of the hardware, but rather by willingness of people to adopt it. Saying the tech is getting better doesn’t prove the tech is solving a salient problem. And I don’t see managers and employees being thrilled about strapping on a headset for every meeting. As a simple heuristic, I (somebody who’s logged many hours on my oculus) do not want to meet in the metaverse, for the reasons you state here.
I’ll go even further though; videoconferencing is overrated compared with phone calls. For socializing, sure it’s nice to see peoples’ faces. But when you’re just trying to exchange information, a phone call suffices. As a teacher I never see the faces of people who I’m working with on fundraising… sometimes never even hear their voice if we just exchange emails. If you ran a double-blind experiment with a thousand participants to compare how much information was being conveyed with a video call vs a phone call, sure you might find a smidgen of difference. But I’d wager the effect would be an order of magnitude smaller than if you just gave everyone a cup of coffee before the meeting.
Good post. I was exposed to very similar advice a few years ago and tried to put it into practice when my partner’s father died soon after. During her long periods of grief she’d occasionally apologize for dragging me into this, and I’d simply reassure her that pain is the right thing to feel and that I’d be with her as she let grief take its course. I cringe at the thought of giving advice.
This generally gets at a cbt/mindfulness/stoicism truth. You can’t stop pain, you can only change your relationship to it. When you stub your toe, no amount of rationalization is going to make your nerves stop reporting damage. All you can do is breathe and wait it out. Wrestling with the feeling will just aggravate it and add anxiety to the pain. Giving advice implies there’s a way around a pain, which there usually isn’t, and unintentionally implies it’s the person’s fault for suffering.
We all know this, but it bears repeating that empathy is hard. Nobody likes seeing a loved one suffer, and dwelling on it doesn’t make it easier. It’s ok to hurt too.