There are actually tech-based reasons that on video calls, you look 1) eerily unfamiliar to yourself 2) like shit.
To back up for a second: You may wonder, as I did, do I really look as lousy as I do on my laptop screen during a miserable work meeting, or when I first open FaceTime? And friend, I have some good, scientifically supported news: no, probably not. Intrigued, I asked for his secret, and he bestowed it upon me: Get thee a clip-on wide-angle lens meant for amateur photography, and bring it to thy computer. When he signed on to our Google Hangout, I noticed that he looked different in a way I couldn't place… more relaxed… less stressed… cuter… more like a 90s music video than anyone else I've been interfacing with recently, despite the fact that I knew that he, like myself, was using a years-old MacBook Pro with a crappy webcam. That fateful week in October, I popped into a meeting with my colleague Robby to chat through some Halloween stories (including a particularly amazing piece he was working on about making demented homemade masks of our coworkers). I recommend that you do the same, especially after numerous friends that I've spoken with have discussed also being emotionally terrorized by their webcams. For 45 bucks, I halted the frightening downward trajectory of the appearance-based arm of my self-esteem. Thankfully, back in October 2020-(2020? Never heard of her)-I discovered a trick that would make sitting on all of these calls wayyy less painful: I took a dinky clip-on phone lens that I'd bought for a road trip, and I stuck it on my laptop camera. As it turns out, staring at your own increasingly stressed, Dorian Gray-esque, rapidly-aging-with-each-new-COVID-horror-story face for hours a day isn't actually as fun as we had initially presupposed! It is not something that human beings, with their delicate sense of identity, are meant to do all day and all night-let alone indefinitely, as our future of working from home looks more and more solidified. Then, just a month or two into our roller coaster ride, the burnout arrived.
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