During the COVID pandemic, I got addicted to Zoom meetings. I like both learning and social connection, and zoom meetings met both of these needs. I enjoyed the new people energy of these meetings. My novelty neurons were stimulated. Most weeknights, I’d be on a zoom meeting. Some nights, I had two.
But, when the meeting was over and those squares-containing-faces disappeared, I’d be left sitting alone in my room.
After about a year like this, I canceled my membership to an online community where I’d probably spent hundreds of hours. This felt like a break-up. It wasn’t fun. Yet, after I did this, I had much more space in my life to seek in-person community.
Zooms meetings kept me pacified, but not truly fulfilled. In order to get to a higher peak, I had to “face the blank page” of the unknown. For a time, this made me less happy (the downward sloped arrow in the doodle above). I felt fear.
Yet this white space was also an opportunity, a gift. I could use this space to build in-person community.
Only now, after some time away from zoom life, do I see that my zoom addiction was a local maximum. When I was in it, I didn’t have that insight. That’s what made it hard to change.
This post is a reminder for myself: the blank page is an opportunity. On the other side of uncertainty waits a more fulfilling thing.
danscreativeoulet 