No, this doesn’t have to do with a wedding. Our wedding is well in the rearview mirror and after all these years we are still happily married. We’re beating the odds while we refrain from beating each other.
I’m off track and it’s only the second paragraph.
What I’m actually talking about when it comes to “Engagement Fatigue” is the fatigue I feel after dealing with people all day long, mostly through electronic means. All of my work interactions are through Zoom-like meetings, that PTSD inducing “ding” noise spewed by Microsoft Teams, or responding to an obviously chatbot crafted email from someone that felt they had something important to say. That’s my work day. Then, if I choose to partake in a little social media, it’s all electronic there as well. Everything is digital, digital, digital, and quite frankly, by now I’m super tired of the bits and the bytes. This is one of the reason I enjoyed living in Chicago up until the pandemic; one could go to a neighborhood pub and talk to people in an analog sort of way without having to star in a sitcom with Ted Danson and Shelley Long. I like analog. It’s one of the reasons I enjoy my storm chasing trip; I talk to people I don’t know and that I’ll probably never talk to again, and it’s face to face in the way humans were originally intended to communicate. Sure, they may have written a book and there’s a super slight chance (less than .0001%) that I read their book about their wife’s quilting hobby but it’s a book and like face to face communication, that’s analog.
I’m getting Engagement Fatigue from digital communication all the time. It’s probably as tiring as watching me pop in and out of “Bewitched” like videos on a regular basis. I need some analog in my life.
Maybe I’m turning into an 8-track tape.
