November 25, 2020
This is my contribution to the book Software People ...Work From Home, in which software people from around the globe share thoughts and experiences from the pandemic.
As time goes on and the pandemic drags on along with it, we accumulate many experiences. We go through different phases, responding to the ebb and flow of the pandemic.
Here in Norway, we experienced a world that first shrank a little, then shrank a lot, until it stabilized around late spring. Then it seemed to gradually grow a little larger through the summar and towards autumn. Now, as the number of infections is growing, the world is shrinking again, approaching April size. While that’s quite small, at least now we can see some end to it due to the vaccines that will soon be available. We can expect the world to grow in size again. Perhaps next summer or next winter, it will be almost as large as it used to be.
All of the experiences we have accumulated during the pandemic fall under the umbrella of exception and unusualness. We are not in a normal state. And yet any exceptional state inevitably starts the work of establishing itself as a new normal. We learn to live with it. We wash our hands diligently, we wear masks in public, we keep our distance, those who can work from home. But it’s not without challenges.
Among my experiences with life during the pandemic, I would like to write a little about my experiences with what I call multiselfing.
Contrary to what we typically say and think about ourselves, none of us is one. That is to say, human individuals are not so much coherent single identities as complex fractals of identities. “I am large, I contain multitudes,” as Walt Whitman put it. Thinking of ourselves as one - coherent, indivisible, unified - is a poor model for what it’s really like to be human. I am not one, I am many. All of those are of course Einar, hosted in the same physical body, in the same brain. To some extent they overlap and share traits and tendencies. But they’re not necessarily coherent - I’m sure I contradict myself in many ways. If I wrote down descriptions of the various versions of me you might encounter in the world, it might not be obvious to you that they’re all the same person.
There is no dishonesty or deceit in this. As humans, we are simply different people to different people. It’s how humans work. It’s a necessary survival skill that evolution has imbued us with. We are shape-shifting creatures that turn into the version of ourselves we think is most suited to the situation at hand and the person or people we face. We can even be different people to the same people. For instance, when I go to a restaurant with my wife, I am date me or romantic-partner me or something like that. It is a persona quite distinct from collaborate-on-house-chores me.
We often label these different personas that we channel “roles”, but that is both reductionist and inaccurate. It’s a poor description of reality. Being a father to my children is not just a role played by some undivisible essential “I”. While it’s easy to think that there is some “real me” hiding beneath these personas, there really isn’t. In fact, the just me persona (that is, how I behave when I’m alone) is no more real than father me or spouse me or coworker me. All of these are distinct identities, and all of them are equally me. If there is such a thing as an “I” that is Einar, it is exactly this collection of identities.
As contexts and circumstances around us change, we seamlessly switch between our different personas without really noticing. In normal circumstances, the number of switches are limited and reasonably predictable. When I am at home, I rarely become any of my Einar-as-coworker personas. Conversely, when I am at work, I rarely become any of my Einar-as-family personas. Whole classes of personas are clearly separated in both time and space. Compartmentalized, contained and clean.
This matters, because although we are rarely conscious about switching personas, it is not free. It takes a little bit of time and a little bit of energy. You could say there is a little cool-down period between switches, similar to loading a new program in a computer. Moreover, the further the distance between two personas - say a professional persona and a family persona - more energy needed, the more time needed, and hence the longer cool-down period.
The pandemic dramatically changed the playing board for this switching game. When the world shrinks to a point - your house, say - these different personas come in closer contact to each other, and the frequencies and distance of necessary switches both increase. There is a beautiful passage in a poem by T.S. Eliot that goes “There will be time, there will be time/To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet”. But as the world shrinks, so does the amount of time we have available to prepare the appropriate face. The illusion and seamlessness falters, faces bleed into each other. When we have to switch rapidly, we get confused. Who should we be? I can’t be everyone at the same time.
All of this was acerbated by the fact that change always intensifies the need for communication. I - all of my selves in all their contexts! - needed to communicate more with all kinds of people. At work, professional me needed to discuss with my coworkers how to adapt our work processes to the new reality of working from home. Professional-yet-friend me chatted a lot with friends at work how we really felt about all of this, how we thought the organization was handling things, and so forth. At home, I needed to evolve a new homeschooling persona to help my children adapt to the new reality of virtual schooling. All of this obviously in close collaboration with my wife, who was going through similar-yet-different processes and changes on her end.
But the biggest problem was the loss of compartmentalization. I needed to switch between these different personas constantly and without warning. Going to get a cup of coffee as professional me, I would encounter not a co-worker at the coffee machine, but my daughter at the kitchen table doing homework. Quick switch to dad me to throw a lame pun at her, before asking if she needed any help, potentially leading to an impromptu appearance of homeschooling me for 20 minutes, if professional me’s schedule allowed for it, or scheduling an appointment with her to do it later. Every day was an constant interleaving of long-distance personas, negotiating with myself which concerns I should address next. And because I had to do non-work during work hours, I would need to do work during non-work hours. All my selves were at play and switching back and forth all day. This is what I think of as multiselfing.
What can be done to reduce the strain of multiselfing? Not a whole lot, since all the different contexts and identities need to co-exist in a small space. Partially the problem abated a bit by itself, as the communication needs eventually went back to fairly normal levels, and new routines and patterns emerged. My best advice against fatigue caused by multiselfing is to try to reimpose a bit of the lost structure and compartmentalization. I have started allocating meetings with myself. I take walks, which allows me to stay uninterrupted in a single persona for a period of time. I can take solitary walks as professional me or as just me, or I can take walks with my wife, my daughter or my son. This reduces the incessant switching and is better for everyone, since there are fewer interrupts. It makes it easier to be me, whoever that may be.