The Lost Art Of Showing Up

Blame Covid for the habits. Work calls, books clubs, exercise classes, happy hours, concerts, ceremonies, shopping. I even took an online master class in hostage negotiation. For a while, screens were the only way to see other people and we convinced ourselves they were almost as good as the real thing. Signing in on Zoom with an avatar or soft-focus tropical background counted as showing up.

The lockdowns are gone (yay!!) but the habits stuck. What began as necessity has become an accepted standard of modern life.

We have more ways to reach each other than any generation before us and yet we somehow have less actual contact. We watch concerts through the phone while we’re recording it. We keep up with old friends by texts and voice memos. We post and scroll highlight reels and kid ourselves that our hundreds of “friends” on social media are actually friends.

We've gotten so good at simulating closeness that a lot of us quietly stopped doing the real thing and never noticed the swap.

It turns out all this digital convenience has created a very human inconvenience: loneliness. And the cost isn’t just emotional.

Chronic disconnection carries health risks on par with smoking 15 cigarettes a day and increases the risk of heart disease and dementia.

It’s not just older generations losing their village either. People ages 15 to 25 now spend roughly 70% less time with friends in person than they did 20 years ago.

That's not a generation opting out of connection. That's a generation handed a very convincing substitute with nobody bothering to show them it isn’t the same thing.

What a Room Actually Does to You

Here's the part that doesn't make it into the doom-scroll headlines: sitting in a room with other people isn't just nicer than being alone with your phone. It's a different biological event. When people sing or move or even just sit together through something emotional, their bodies release oxytocin. That’s the hormone tied to trust and bonding, the same one that makes new mothers stare at their infants lovingly, regardless of how little sleep either of them is getting.

Heart rates start to sync up without anyone agreeing to it. Researchers who compared audiences watching a string quartet live versus over a livestream found the people in the room reported a stronger sense of belonging than the ones watching the identical performance from their couch. Same musicians and same notes. But a different chemistry. A screen can hand you the information. It cannot hand you the energy in a room.

Conversation does something similar. When two people are deep in real conversation, their brain activity begins to sync. That kind of connection doesn’t happen over text. It happens when you’re close enough to catch the pause before the punchline or the breath someone takes before finally admitting what’s really wrong.

The Real Villain Isn't Your Phone

The empty advice to "just unplug" is repeated so often that it's stopped meaning anything at all. The deeper problem isn't that phones exist. It's that we spent a few decades quietly bulldozing the places that used to make showing up even possible and then acted shocked when everyone stayed home.

In the 1980s, the term "third place" came into use. It meant anywhere that wasn't home or work where people could gather without much of an agenda. The local diner. The barbershop. The pizza parlor with a pool table. Back then, the concern wasn’t phones. It was strip malls and suburban sprawl. But the observation still holds: when communities stop building places for people to hang out together, the hanging out doesn't relocate. It just stops happening. The phone didn't kill the third place. It moved in after the third place was already dying.

Which is really an argument for something more useful than turning your phone over and not watching every notification that shows up. It's an argument for actively going and finding the room. The museum. The park. The coffee shop. The local restaurant with the little stage in the corner.

Why Jazz Never Left the Room

If any art form was built to prove this point, it’s jazz. The room was part of the music. The band knew how its playing was landing because the audience couldn’t help but answer. That might be applause on a good night and whispers or yawns on a bad one.

That’s part of what makes jazz so intimate and communal. It’s built on call and response, one of the oldest forms of human communication we have. Someone offers a phrase. Someone answers. The music changes because of it. No two nights sound the same because no two bands, solos, or audiences are the same.

Some bands, like Duke Ellington’s, used the same tune to close their broadcasts. On radio, a signature ending made sense. People thousands of miles away would hear it and know it was time to turn the radio off and go wash the coffee cups. In a club, the ending was less predictable. The band could read the room. A tune might linger, or pick up an extra chorus just for kicks. The evening ended when it felt like it was time. Kind of like the difference between ending an email and ending a conversation in person.

Showing Up Is An Old-Fashioned Kind of Rebellion

Our original salon series (in the “ballroom”) was built around that concept. Musicians walked out, through the narrow path between the tables and audience. And without saying so out loud, everyone agreed to spend the next hour or so (it all depended on if the musicians were in a chatty mood) paying attention to something together. They laughed at the same moment. They clapped and cheered at the end of a swinging solo. And by the end of the night, they were usually a little less like strangers than when they walked in. They talked about the music they just heard. Or a story the bandleader told.

The songs they played were written for rooms full of people, whether that be in a living room with a piano, a basement club, or a theater stage. Even today, that’s where the songs are most at home. Yes, when recorded, they're beautiful. But put them back in a room full of people and something else happens. Nothing digital (to date) has ever managed to capture that. But then, meaningful life experiences are never easy to copy.

Most of us don’t relish the thought of replicating a pack-a-day smoking habit but the anecdote is not that complicated. Go hear a band play live. Walk through a museum without narrating it for your stories. Call the friend instead of texting them. Go somewhere, with someone, without turning it into content. None of it is revolutionary. It just feels that way now, because showing up has quietly become the thing nobody does by default anymore.

Getting ourselves back into the room may take some convincing. Luckily, I took that hostage negotiation class.