Our conceptualization of reality currently holds no space for people’s linguistic processors being able to tell scheduled authenticity—which is almost by definition not authenticity—from spontaneous authenticity—the only true kind.

Perhaps we cannot.

I suspect we can.

In video, the gap is more obvious. There is a subtle difference between live video and recorded video.

I recently watched Alex Honnold climb a Taiwanese skyscraper live and it was the most riveting thing I’ve ever seen. I tried to watch some other recorded video of the same types of activity and didn’t feel anything like what I had felt when I knew I was watching it with other people, when I knew it was happening now.

But there was a similar asynchronous desensitization of experience when I worked remotely for years. I never felt like I got to know the people, even though we had spent dozens of hours together. I wouldn’t have known how tall they were standing or what kind of footwear they like. I only knew the strange little box they inhabited on my computer screen. Something about it didn’t land in the same part of my brain.

Technology creates new ways to communicate. They seem analogous, interchangeable, indistinguishable from one another. They’re convenient. They save so much time and money.

But they don’t feel that way in practice. And we aren’t doing much to think proactively about what is lost each time we sacrifice connection for convenience.