Do You Have ‘Zoom Fatigue’ or Is It Existentially Crushing to Pretend Life Is Normal as the World Burns?

Questions to ponder

Devon Price
Forge
Published in
3 min readSep 24, 2020

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A woman lying sideways on a sofa covering her face with her hands.
Photo: Ute Grabowsky/Photothek/Getty Images

Do you have “Zoom fatigue,” or is it emotionally and existentially crushing to have to pretend to be chipper during your company’s strategic planning meeting while hundreds of thousands of people are dying and the sky burns?

Have you had “too much screen time,” or are you being forced to sit attentively for hours at your desk, moving your mouse frequently enough to not prompt an alert by your company’s activity-tracker, while a litany of terrifying news alerts flash in the periphery of your vision?

Is your kid “too active for online learning,” or is their sympathetic nervous system flooded with an attention-destroying quantity of cortisol due to fear, confusion, and lack of agency, making it impossible for their developing brain to focus on something as inconsequential-seeming as times tables?

Is “time so weird right now,” or have you lost all sense of progression in your life because you no longer have any routine-breaking events or holidays or changes of scenery to look forward to, only the repetitive cycle of the same bland emails to write and the same virus case count graphs to watch and the same harrowing scenes of police brutality to revisit day after day?

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Devon Price
Forge
Writer for

He/Him or It/Its. Social Psychologist & Author of LAZINESS DOES NOT EXIST and UNMASKING AUTISM. Links to buy: https://linktr.ee/drdevonprice