Is all the screen time and lack of social interaction making me lose the ability to talk?
This story originally appeared on Vogue.in
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In a world full of virtual communities, has speaking become redundant? One Vogue writer explores this through her own experience
Although I’ve never identified as a particularly chirpy or talkative person, ever since the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020, I’ve virtually stopped using my voice. Save for the mandatory updates during morning work meetings and the 15-minute-long chit-chat session with my mother over lunch breaks—most days I don’t speak that much at all. I also have the average millennial’s aversion to phone calls, recoiling into mild anxiety every time a known number hijacks my screen, as I’m then forced to clear my throat and smoothen my voice before I’m ready to present myself to the exterior world. Add to this the proliferation of virtual workspaces and social media communities, and there are days when I can better get my thoughts across via a GIF than any words. As my voice starts to seem like an increasingly redundant tool, and as the infamous ‘lockdown blah’, or ‘languishing’—as the popular lexicon goes—simultaneously creeps up on me, I wonder about the correlation between actively using one’s speech and one’s mental state of being.
“The evolutionary import of the voice is very significant as it is a vehicle of emotion, expression, connection, communication and setting boundaries. Using the voice helped our ancestors cry for help, warn others of danger, find mates, comfort the young, convey solidarity and create relationships. The unconscious manifests in one's speech. In therapeutic settings, I pay attention to the shifts in the paralinguistics of my clients by observing the tone, pitch, delivery and speed of their voice to understand their psycho-emotional state,” explains Mumbai-based somatic psychotherapist Sonera Jhaveri.
As memes and text messages replace water cooler conversations and chai-breaks with my coworkers, Netflix watch parties fill in for date-night plans, and Tika the Iggy’s voice seems more familiar to my ears than my own, there’s also an insidious, discomfiting feeling in my body that I can’t ignore. Much like the nostalgia for manual dexterity that the abrupt switch from pens to keyboard brought about in my early years of university, the shift from talking to typing has made me miss the visceral act of using my voice.
Jhaveri affirms my need. “Humans are mammals who co-evolved with other humans and animals and need contact, mirroring, communication and interaction,” she says. “Due to the technological shifts in our material culture from analog to digital along with the pandemic protocols of masking, social distancing, lockdowns, etc, one's existential skills to connect with one's body, other humans, and the natural world are indeed diminishing.”
The situation hasn’t been all doom and gloom, though. As someone who writes for a full-time job, my profession mandates me to spend increased amounts of time in my head—mining thoughts, arranging them in a coherent order, prettying them up for the paper. The initial switch to a work-from-home environment—or as Virginia Woolf calls it, “a room of one’s own”—felt blissful, to say the least. There were no sudden interruptions to my thought flow, as is often the case in an office setting. In those initial months of the pandemic, I thought of the now-deafening silence as some much-needed peace and quiet. At what point did the switch occur, and what triggered it?
“We all have different psychological landscapes, and some individuals feel comfortable with inner, contemplative work, while for others, their neuroses and psychosis could get exasperated. For the average person, when they are generally silent for extended periods, there is a tendency to drop down into the internal monologue that one is entertaining in one's mind. One can retreat into one's mind and dissociate from reality,” Jhaveri responds. (Is this why I’ve been jumbling up my phonetics lately: “You’ve hit the hail on the nead”?) She elaborates that being silent can feel very different if one is coerced into solitary confinement. There is no outlet for personal expression, as opposed to, say, going on a temporary meditation retreat where one wants to silence the mind—the person, their mental health and context are paramount.
As someone who values expression of thought, I’ve come to realise that the performative part of the act—voice, diction, tone and enunciation—is just as important as what lies underneath. In fact, it’s not that different from writing at all. Both formats require you to lend authority to your thoughts by finalising the rough draft that exists inside your head, and in doing so, help boost your self-confidence and feel more in sync with your environment. I have since benefitted from carving out conscious pockets of time to utilise my speech—reading the news out to my mum in the morning, calling up my best friend during evening walks, replacing internal smiles at Chandler Bing’s sarcastic comments with literal LOLs, singing along with my jamming sessions on the ukulele.
Sonera advises, “I think everyone needs to get in touch with their felt sense, nervous system and emotional headspace to get insight into how much contact and real-time conversation they need. I would recommend observing how one is daily and see on days of less contact how one does and on days when there is more social interaction. Too much or too little contact is problematic as no extreme is good. Based on how happy, relaxed, and present you feel in varying degrees of social interaction, you will understand what is optimum for you.”
