It is two years now of living with COVID-19 and we don’t know when it will end. After losing millions of lives across the world to the infection, a sense of dread prevails about Omicron, the new variant of SARS-CoV-2. One also shudders to think if another potentially more deadly variant is lurking behind it. Besides, it is not sure if we are safe from catching COVID-19 after getting fully vaccinated, plus a booster dose.
No wonder, businesses are shutting down and schools are closed as staff became COVID positive, theatres and shopping malls shut, and the immunocompromised elders stay at home, in isolation. Cancellation of social gatherings makes people depressed and lonely. According to the Surgeon General of the United States, Vivek Murthy, loneliness is a root cause of several diseases, including addiction to alcohol and drugs, depression, and anxiety.
In a survey conducted in 2020-21, a Professor of sociology at the University of Wollongong, Roger Patulny, and his colleague Marlee Bower have assessed the long-term impact of COVID on the social lives of people in Australia. They observed that many Australians went through a reduction in the quality and size of their friendships, and a disconnect and loneliness. Living insular lives carries the risk of shrinking of one’s friends circle.
When surrounded by uncertainties, fear and anxiety, we naturally seek social interactions with friends. Each one of us has a few ‘valued’ friends of long standing — some of whom since childhood or student days. They spark joy and relief during meetings, physical or online, due to common bonds of shared memories. These are friends forever, on whom you can fall back on, when required. Then, we have second-tier friends at workplace or in neighbourhood. Most such friendships fade out when we leave that office or shift residence. Among third-tier friends are acquaintances, with whom we exchange pleasantries, and indulge in short formal conversations.
I am now 75, and have had a number of ‘valued’ friends, who have remained true buddies for over 50 years. Irrespective of whether we contacted one another quite frequently, or had only sparse contacts, we have had a life-long togetherness. Such friendship exists between me and two others since 1965, when we stayed in a hostel in Mumbai together for a year. Over the years, we have had numerous shared memories, personal, or familial. We are in regular touch on phone and WhatsApp, and have family get-togethers, whenever possible. One of them is a friend in every time of need, very brotherly and protective. The other one and I share a lot of frivolities. He lives in Bangalore. Whenever we both meet, or are on phone, there is invariably a mirth-quake. Humour bonds, and when long-time friends reminisce about shared happy memories, it is pure nostalgia.
There is another ‘valued’ friend in my circle, since 1969. We meet sometimes, but do talk on phone regularly, discussing poetry and other things. My fourth ‘valued’ friend came into my contact about 20 years ago. He is much younger than me, but age never counted in the no-holds-barred bilateral discussions that we have, once a fortnight.
As they say ‘life is beautiful and worth living’. Therefore, why should we allow the pandemic to prune our tendency to chat with friends and have fun and laughter together, to aid our physical well-being?
Staying in contact with ‘valued’ friends during the pandemic has also helped me to cultivate and sustain intellectual humility. That keeps me from overestimating my abilities, knowledge and beliefs while handling anxiety-filled issues during the pandemic. A runny nose, a sniffle, a body ache has people panicking and rushing to testing centres, to check if it is a cold or COVID-19. In such times, a chat with learned friends can ease the tension.
The boom in social media usage has provided easy, soothing connectivity between friends at a distance. Imagine if such a lockdown had happened 40 years ago, with each one of us under lockdown in our respective homes but no way to check the well-being of friends and relatives. Some of us got carried away to spend more and more time on social media with close friends, and less and less with others, which too caused ‘shrinking’ of friendship networks during lockdowns. The study by Patulny and Bower found that singles, or those with disabilities, were more vulnerable to losing friends. Does the shrinking of one’s circle of friends signal a whole new change in our behavioural patterns? In the case of old people, loss of friends implies a serious impact on their mental and physical health because they have already discontinued regular visits to their doctors, and do not exercise well during the pandemic.
College students have not only missed in-person classes for almost two years, but also the friendships they had made on campus. In fact, the campus life, per se, has been replaced with restrictions on mixing among students, leading to much loss of knowledge which would have accrued through mutual interactions amongst peers. The 1996 Chemistry Nobel laureate, the late Professor Harold Kroto, admitted once candidly that perhaps only half of his learning at university came from textbooks and teachers, the other half was through interactions with fellow-students.
Long spells of online teaching have left school students socially isolated from classmates. But worried parents are instructing their wards to stay masked and keep their distance at school, which goes against the tenets that school-going children should play, interact, learn together and socialise without fear. Whom to blame when even birthdays of school-going children are being celebrated on Zoom, during the pandemic?
With Omicron sweeping the world at alarming speed, it appears that the coronavirus is not going away soon. Follow health protocols to stay fit and unharmed but do interact online, regularly with friends. Reconnect with friends you admired once, but lost them in the mist of time. Unlike in other relationships, you don’t need to know where and how to pick up the threads again with friends. Friends provide an outlet like none else can.
