The night that sports began shutting down was the night that the United States began shutting down. On March 11, 2020, an announcer at the Oklahoma City Thunder’s home arena told fans just before tip-off that the evening’s game had been postponed. Within an hour, the visiting Utah Jazz revealed that a player—soon identified as the center Rudy Gobert—had tested positive for COVID-19, and the NBA also declared that it was indefinitely suspending the season. Suddenly, Americans were forced to accept that the coronavirus pandemic was going to completely disrupt everyday life.
Although the NBA eventually resumed its season by creating a playoff bubble, and other professional and college leagues figured out a way to return in some form, the sports world is still struggling for normalcy nearly a year after widespread shutdowns began and fans turned their attention to matters of life and death.
As the pandemic dragged on, the leagues, universities, pro franchises, and other entities that profit from a multibillion-dollar sports economy made a push for games to return. But these efforts also reflected a working assumption that the mere presence of sports would provide comfort, and perhaps a welcome distraction, for people who wanted to escape the horrors of the pandemic, at least momentarily.
In 2016, I interviewed an entrepreneur named Sean who had co-founded a small technology startup based in London. As with many organizations at that time, Sean and his team relied on e-mail as their primary collaboration tool. “We used to have our Gmail constantly opened,” he said. Then they heard about a slick new instant-messenger service named Slack that promised to streamline office communication: “There was this hype, so we decided to try it.” Once the team switched to the tool, the rate of back-and-forth messaging intensified, eventually reaching a stressful peak when a demanding client insisted on the ability to directly communicate with Sean’s employees using Slack. The team soon burned out, and two engineers quit. In desperation, Sean moved the company off Slack. When I spoke with him, some time had passed since this incident, but the memory of the service’s omnipresent notification ping remained strong. “I hear that sound, it gives me the shivers,” he said.
I thought about Sean when I heard about Salesforce’s proposed acquisition of Slack for close to twenty-eight billion dollars. From a financial perspective, the deal probably makes sense. Sean’s company was one of many to embrace this platform when it arrived on the knowledge-work scene. Today, Slack has millions of users and reported more than six hundred million dollars in revenue for the last fiscal year. The shift toward remote work during the pandemic only reinforces the company’s value to the marketplace. But a lot of us share Sean’s fatigue with Slack. Writing in The New Republic, Timothy Noah laments that the platform transformed the American workplace into a “dystopian micro-Twitterverse,” while the technology journalist Casey Newton tweeted, “Salesforce is paying $28 billion for an app that people shut down when they need to get things done.” Slack is both absolutely necessary and absolutely aggravating; we rely on it, but we also can’t stand it. To dismiss this confused reaction as the usual grumbling about new forms of communication, however, would be a mistake. A closer look at Slack reveals an underlying dynamic with potential economic ramifications that make twenty-eight billion dollars seem paltry.
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Slack is both absolutely necessary and absolutely aggravating: we rely on it, but we also can’t stand it. Photograph from Panther Media GmbH / Alamy
Even though the presidential election is over, we’re still doomscrolling through gloomy news about the coronavirus surge. The rest of your daily routine is probably something like mine while stuck at home in the pandemic: Divided among streaming movies on Netflix, watching home improvement videos on YouTube, and playing video games. All of these activities involve staring at a screen.
There has to be more to life than this. With the holiday season upon us, now is a good time to take a breather and consider a digital detox.
No, that doesn’t mean quitting the internet cold turkey. No one would expect that from us right now. Think of it as going on a diet and replacing bad habits with healthier ones to give our weary eyes some much-needed downtime from tech.
“There’s lots of great things to do online, but moderation is often the best rule for life, and it’s no different when it comes to screens,” said Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University and the author of “iGen,” a book about younger generations growing up in the smartphone era.
Jack Dorsey doesn’t eat anything in the morning. Instead, he meditates for two hours, takes an ice bath, and drinks a lot of water. He doesn’t eat anything for lunch, either. After subsisting on water all day, Dorsey consumes a dinner of proteins, greens, and mixed berries between 6:30-8:30pm, as the Twitter CEO explained on the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast in April 2019.
If Dorsey were a woman, we might call this disordered eating. But because he’s a man—and a powerful one in the tech industry—we call it “optimizing.”
For decades, women, especially those in the public eye, bore the brunt of unrealistic beauty standards, which caused many to develop or exacerbated unhealthy relationships with food. Actress and Goop founder Gwenyth Paltrow reportedly ate 300 calories a day during a January 2018 detox regimen; reality TV star Nicole Richie admitted that she “liv[es] on a diet of sunflower seeds, celery juice, and chewing gum.” Just this week, Today Show hosts Jenna Bush Hager and Hoda Kotb weighed themselves on live television after spending a week only eating between 10am and 6pm, with the intention of losing weight and improving “brain health, and energy and skin.”
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Jack Dorsey has been a vocal proponent of intermittent fasting. Photo by David Becker/Getty Images
“It’s such an interesting feeling,” said Alex Delaney, 28, a teacher who lives in Brooklyn. “I fully identify as an introvert and like to spend time alone, but I’ve had more urges [in the last year] than ever to want to be at a club or go to a bar, which are places I would never go prior to the pandemic. It’s funny, though, because I feel like once I do have the option to go to those places again, I probably won’t.”
Delaney is one of the thousands of introverts who responded to a callout from BuzzFeed News asking how the pandemic has affected them. It’s easy to assume that for a group of people known to relish their alone time, a pandemic that encourages social distancing and isolation might paradoxically offer some great respite. It’s not that simple though.
While a great portion of respondents noted that their desire for socializing has decreased during the pandemic, others realized that they do like — and even need — a decent amount of human interaction from time to time, like Jane Eckles, 24, of Hartland, Wisconsin. “I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like when a person accidentally bumps into you in Target and you start chatting, and you realize that your cousins went to the same college,” she said. “I miss the little things.”
In July, Clare Wenham—and her daughter, Scarlett, and Scarlett’s picture of a unicorn—went viral. Wenham researches global health policy at the London School of Economics, and she was giving an interview to the BBC about Britain’s attempts to manage the coronavirus pandemic. But Scarlett had another pressing issue on her mind: Which shelf displayed her unicorn to its best advantage?
Wenham soldiered on through Scarlett’s entreaties, and her interviewer even offered his opinion (the lower shelf, if you’re interested). The moment provided a neat contrast with another incident three years earlier, also on the BBC, when the South Korea expert Robert Kelly was interrupted by his children during a live interview from his home. Back then, the clip’s humor came from Kelly’s wife desperately trying to salvage his professional facade by running into the room to retrieve his 4-year-old daughter and nine-month-old son. For Wenham, that wasn’t an option: Her partner was working in another room, oblivious to the chaos. She just had to get on with it.
The idealized image of working parents as swans—serene on the surface, frantically paddling away under the water—has been an unexpected casualty of the pandemic. Zoom meetings have ensured that employers, and the outside world, can’t help but see the struggle.
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Hulton Archive / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty / Adam Maida / The Atlantic
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Adam Maida / Getty / The Atlantic
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