What’s social about distancing?
Why social distancing might be overturning our scale of needs more than we think.
What is it that we miss (or missed) the most during quarantine?
I use the word quarantine as it’s the commonly accepted term to indicate the time of social distancing we’re spending at home in an attempt to stop CoVid-19 from spreading further.
Even though quarantine literally means “a time frame of forty days”, for most of us, it has been far more than that before slowly going back to any embryonal form of ordinary life.
There’s most certainly not just one answer as it depends both on personal inclinations and a person’s current situation however, the first thing people tried to get around while on quarantine was the sudden lack of conviviality by finding new ways of social interaction. Actual face-to-face interaction, something that lately, we were consciously or unconsciously avoiding almost to the extent of becoming low key terrified by it.
We started using FaceTime, HouseParty, Skype, Hangouts… you name it, as never before.
It’s about conviviality in the end, isn’t it?
How come that in a time when fear of death broke into our everyday lives as probably never before for most of us, our first urge, ok maybe second after the quest for food and toilet paper, is to rebuild the bridges of companionship with friends, family and loved ones?
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs puts belongingness and love on the third level of the pyramid however, it’s the first step of the second block, so basically it’s the most fundamental of our psychological needs.
Maybe though, in desperate times such as these, the pyramid undergoes what I would call a turnover and perhaps, the separation between physical and psychological becomes thinner, and safety comes not only by having enough food in the pantry but through that ancestral need of belonging to your tribe.
I guess that in current times, that idea of belonging could be identified also as “conviviality” which doesn’t necessarily depend on a place but it drills down to the act of sharing.
The environment helps of course but most of all, conviviality is about feeling connected to one another. Even in days like these, each of us found a way recreate conviviality with friends, family and loved ones, despite being physically apart.
Conviviality makes us feel stronger and when we feel stronger together, we feel we can overcome anything, perhaps even death.
