Is my red your red? Is my experience your experience?
There’s a longstanding (and possibly unanswerable) question of whether one person’s experience of the physical world is the same as another person’s experience of the physical world. The question is often framed in terms of colour: (if we have no visual impairments) I know what it is like to see the colour red; you know what it is like to see the colour red; we even agree on the things that are coloured red; but we cannot know whether our subjective experience of red is identical.
Whether it is possible to answer this question or not, I think that there are things that have the same external, physical characteristics, but very different subjective experiences: our interactions with other people. I also think that this difference is amplified by working from home in lockdown. (And, as ever, I have to point out that when considering this experience, those of us working from home have to remember how fortunate we are to be healthy, housed and in work.)
Let’s try to think back to times before lockdown when we could interact with each other in the same space. Remember that time you made a terrible mistake in a meeting: you got a key fact wrong, you stumbled and lost your way in the middle of a presentation, or you called someone by the wrong name. If you are anything like me, that mistake looms large in your mind for some time (sometimes a long time) afterwards: you replay it and wish that you could erase it from the past. Yet, when you talk to your friends and colleagues, you find that they barely remember it - if they even noticed it in the first place. Their experience of your mistake is very different from your experience of your mistake.
When we share a physical space, there are opportunities for us to correct for this asymmetry of experience. You make the terrible mistake in the meeting, and you brood about it until the meeting finishes. On the way out of the door, one of your colleagues casually says ‘Good meeting!’ ‘Apart from <great big error>,’ you mumble. ‘That was nothing,’ says your colleague. ‘No big deal. Don’t worry about it.’ You may still regret your mistake, but now you have information to counter that regret: you are able to bring your experience closer to that of the others in the room.
And we sometime experience apparent setbacks at work which are much more than a mistake in a meeting.We feel attacked or belittled in a public forum. We feel that we have let someone down. We feel at odds with our colleagues. And these feelings loom large in our mind, even when others may perceive the situation very differently.
Unfortunately, many of the opportunities to bring our experiences and perceptions closer to each other are inhibited by our current circumstances. Rather than chat with our colleagues on the way out of the meeting room, we press the ‘leave call’ or ‘hangup’ button on our video-conferencing tool of choice. Rather than see people in the morning on the way into the office, or at lunch, or at the coffee shop, we work in isolation in our workspaces at home. Our experiences loom larger when we have fewer chances to compare them with those of others.
As usual, I have an unscientific sample size of one, but I believe from my own experience that, while working remotely in lockdown, mistakes seem bigger, problems seem harder, and it is easier to be at cross purposes with others. I don’t mind admitting that I have spent more time worrying about things that, when I was able to connect with others, I found that I didn't need to worry about. I also doubt that I am alone in this experience.
Of course, we hope that can address this problem by returning to some form of what we used to consider normal. However, this will take time, and it is likely that we will continue with a higher level of home working than before. It is also true that, even when we can meet in person again, we will still have different experiences and perceptions of our interactions, and that even the opportunity for informal, face to face interaction will not unite all of them.
I therefore think that we should learn a lesson from our lockdown experience, and should remember, first, that we do not all experience the world in the same way and, second, the only remedies for this are communication and empathy. While we are still in lockdown, we can take the opportunity to check in with our colleagues to see if the things we are worried about are really worth worrying about: we can seek their feedback, even on little things. This might seem awkward or embarrassing, especially over video-conference, but I believe that it is worth the effort. And, when we are out of lockdown, we can still make the extra time to seek and provide feedback, and to imagine the experience of the other people we interact with.
We all spend a lot of time inside our own heads. Lockdown has forced us to spend even more time than usual there. The only way to determine whether my experience is the same as your experience is to tell each other about it.
