“You’ve just been sitting in a moving chair this whole time!”
“Do you want to drive?”
“I’m not criticizing, I’m making a point. I don’t think you’re exhausted because of the driving. I think you’re mentally exhausted from riding with me.”
“That is, uh, not the shocking revelation you think it is.”
“No, listen. I think you find it draining to deal with anyone face-to-face. And I think it’s specifically because you can’t control it. Online, you can duck out of any conversation, you can say anything you want, you can calibrate how you come across. Not here.”
“The ability to block people yelling death threats and making racist jokes is a net positive, in my mind.”
“Sure, but I think our interactions could be totally great the whole time and you’d find it just as exhausting because the world has trained you to be afraid of being fully and truly perceived. We’re social animals; that’s the equivalent of making a fish afraid of water! We evolved in tribes where everybody could see everybody else, all the time; we didn’t even have separate rooms or beds. Just by evolution, you should find personal contact comforting, and the fact that they’ve burned that out of so many of us is apocalyptic.”