Contactless Arrival

Friends, I am not making this up. In every walk of life, we are striving to eliminate human contact and then pay huge sums of money to sit in a room with a professional therapist (or worse yet, engage over Zoom) to discuss why we’re so lonely. 

 

I’ve said this so many times before and a lot recently. We can go to the hotel in a driverless car, order dinner from Grub Hub, sit alone in our room watching TV, scroll through our ‘friend’s’ posts on Facebook, have Chatgpt write an e-mail for us and wonder why we feel disconnected from human companionship. We, of course, are responsible for making those choices and have the power to refuse them. But most people are not built for such resistance and when the whole thrust of a culture is encouraging us, rewarding us, building its structures around machine interaction, it does its dirty work effectively and efficiently. 

 

This rant came from the above note from my hotel, encouraging me to avoid having to talk for a minute with a clerk at the desk. By putting things like this in the context of which way the wind is blowing and the damage it can do to our collective culture and individual soul, I’m hoping to make a little ping of resistance that might help you make a more human choice when you can. Ride the bus or take a cab with a live driver, go to the movies and feel the buzz in the air different from your living room, go to the restaurant and sit and talk with your friends from an hour or two or three as they still do in Spain. Or better yet, cook for them at your house and play some board games after dinner. 

 

And for goodness sake, please refuse the Contactless Arrival and talk to the desk clerk!