Down the Zoom Drain
Why video calls make us so sad and tired
If you’ve ever worked remotely, for any amount of time, you’ve probably experienced “Zoom fatigue.” And if it’s happened often enough, you might have wondered why it happens at all. Aren’t video calls supposed to be less demanding than in-person meetings?
After all, you can show up literally the minute it starts, and you can wander away and check email or read articles without anyone realizing you’ve mentally checked out of the weekly report from accounts payable.
You don’t even have to wear pants!
And yet, sometimes after even 30 minutes on a video call, you walk away feeling drained. Anything more than two hours? You might have to just call it a day.
I want to talk about why.
I owe my professional success to Zoom
First, a clarification of terms:
I am loosely defining “professional success” here as the avoidance of starvation. A low bar, perhaps, but far from inconsequential.
As often as I use Zoom itself, the word “Zoom” is also a euphemism for all video calls, like Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Apple FaceTime. Way to go, Zoom!
OK, now a (teeny tiny) bit of history
Ever since I moved to Los Angeles in 2015, the majority of my work has been remote. This included creating and hosting1 ten episodes of a new TV show and running a video marketing company. When we weren’t shooting on location we were working remotely, with me in LA and the rest of my team in Utah.
Then, in 2018, I got an office job for the first time since college.
Near the end of 2019, I made two decisions:
I wanted to pivot to podcasting
I was done with office jobs.
My next corporate gig was remote-first. All my internal and external meetings happened over Zoom, and I personally helped develop multiple workflows for remote production of audio content (podcasts, audio courses, etc). It’s fair to say that in a typical 40 hour workweek, I spent a minimum of 10 hours on video calls of one sort or another.
The first time I saw any of the people I worked with in person was at a company retreat in San Francisco, more than a year later.
Then, in the middle of 2022, the big Chinese media company2 I’d been working for folded up its US-based team, and everyone got let go. Watching the executives burn through capital without achieving any of their stated goals, we all knew the party would end eventually, but it still came as a bit of a shock: the annual budget had just been approved, including raises and bonuses for all. Weird timing.
Six months later, a couple of my former colleagues and I decided our best move was to start our own company. This would, we reasoned, shield us from the fickle caprices of an unstable job market, as well as dramatically raise the ceiling on our earning potential.
Plus, two years of remote work and production had equipped us with all the skills we needed to get Voltage off the ground with virtually3 non-existent overhead.
And now?
As of January, 2024, we’ve successfully built a pipeline of work and clients that might actually pay our bills this year. Hurray!
Of note: I have not met with a single one of our paying clients in person. I expect that to change eventually, but so far, it just hasn’t been necessary.
This is all a disclaimer.
My livelihood literally depends on the technologies that not only enable remote work, but also endow it with a real and growing competitive advantage.
My bias tilts in favor of Zoom.
And yet.
You can’t spend as much time as I have on video calls without becoming acutely aware of what they cost — cognitively and even physically.
If I’ve been on a video call for more than an hour, I can feel it. Just the act of standing up triggers physiological sensations not unlike flu symptoms — body aches, dizziness, a little bit of nausea... And fatigue, sometimes quite severe. Yesterday I spent more than FIVE HOURS on video calls, and I still feel it today.
What’s strange is that other screen-mediated work doesn’t seem to drain me this way. I can work on emails, or writing, or editing, for two or three hours at a stretch, and all I need is a ten or fifteen minute break before diving right back in.
But after a 30 minute Zoom call, it sometimes takes another 30 minutes well away from my computer before I feel ready to get back to work.
What’s going on here?
I’ll tell you right off the bat, it’s not introversion. I like people! I love the connection, the energy. One-on-one conversation is one of the main things I live for. And good phonecalls are super energizing for me. An hour on the phone with a friend charges me up to go conquer the world.
But after 3+ years of encountering and (inevitably) analyzing the effect video calls have on me, I think I have some idea of what the problem is.
It’s about bandwidth.
We already know that some absurdly high percentage of human communication is nonverbal — tone, cadence, facial expressions, hand gestures, body language, etc.
And I’m not sure how far the science stretches here, but I’m convinced there’s a lot of pheromonal, electromagnetic, and possibly even telepathic stuff going on when people are in a room together.
We also know that the vast majority of all this happens sub- or pre-consciously. Which is why effective communication is such an art. There are things you can pay attention to, and consciously alter, but most of it is almost mystical.
We are robustly and somewhat incomprehensibly complex creatures, and nowhere, perhaps, is this more vividly illustrated than in the way people interact with each other in shared spaces.
This is why, in considering the strengths and weaknesses of any particular medium of communication, we should evaluate which of these nonverbal cues can be conducted through it, and which can’t.
This is where video calls get weird
First, let’s think about voice-only calls. The breakdown is simple -- along with the actual words and voice quality, you can get tone, cadence, timing, etc. You can’t get facial expressions4, body language, or any of the other stuff I mentioned that requires proximity.
So, if the problem is simply an inhibition of nonverbal cues, then voice calls should be just as draining as video calls. But they aren’t. Or at least, they aren’t for me, and it seems pretty anecdotally evident that they aren’t for most people.
Video calls, by contrast, are supposed to fix some of this. Not only can you get all the same stuff you can get with a voice call, you also get actual facial expressions (instead of just imagined), and even some hand gestures and body language. Of course, you still don’t get the other stuff that (again) requires physical proximity -- pheromonal signals, for instance. And eye contact is decidedly not the norm — even if you try to fake it, it’s not the same, and you know it, and I know it, and please stop trying to look at the camera.
But shouldn’t video still be better than voice-only, in terms of conveying nonverbals?
I think the problem is that when we’re on a video call, we are, in a sense, tricking our non-conscious communication apparatuses5 into behaving as though we are, in fact, sharing a room with another human being. Even though our conscious minds know this isn’t true, there is a non-conscious over-indexing of effort to connect through a low-fidelity medium.
This point is so important I’m going to pull-quote it.
On a video call, there is a non-conscious over-indexing of effort
to connect through a low-fidelity medium.
You want an analogy? Here’s an analogy:
It’s like how phones used to die faster when the signal was bad6 — the phone’s efforts to grab onto a weak connection would drain the battery faster than if the signal was strong.
So here I am on a Zoom call, and my whole body and brain are attempting to do this incomprehensibly complicated dance of human communication, despite the fact that there is no one else physically in the room. This causes a preponderance of missteps and wasted effort.
Grasping at signals that just aren’t there.
Is VR the answer?
Nope.
Immersive VR will almost certainly make it worse. The better we’re able to trick our non-conscious communication apparatuses into thinking we’re sharing actual physical space, the more effort we will reflexively spend to interact with the nonverbal signals that still don’t exist in that medium.
How to Adapt
Even though they aren’t the majority, there are plenty of people who get exhausted by phonecalls.7 But most people (myself included) are able to properly index efforts of connection over voice calls. Like, maybe all my non-voice nonverbal apparatuses just shut down when I can’t see the person I’m talking to.
The thing is, I never made the decision to stop overindexing nonverbals on the phone, it just happens (or…doesn’t happen?) The question is whether the same thing will just happen with video calls eventually.
Maybe it has, at least a little, but it’s tough to judge. I’d probably need to do some serious neuroscience or something.8
Anyway, there’s one more factor that we might actually have some control over, if we concentrate on it hard enough.
Expectations vs. Reality
When I brought up this subject during one of my six (six!) video calls yesterday9, my friend described a somewhat dramatic example from her own life.
More than a year before Covid, she moved to Los Angeles, but kept working with the same creative team she’d started in another state. Suddenly, she was on video calls with them every day, except instead of being this wonderful, energizing experience, every call ended with her feeling exhausted, confused, and rejected.
“No one would laugh at my jokes,” she said. “Or maybe they were just on mute, or delayed. No one was looking at me. At the end of every meeting, I was convinced that they all hated me, and that I had no friends.”
Conversely, when she got on video calls with people she’d never met in person, there was far less cognitive exhaustion.
Interesting!
And it makes sense. Expectation is not just a conscious phenomenon — it goes all the way down. While my friend might have consciously noticed that she was expecting a certain rhythm in the conversational dance with her friends that had been so familiar in person (and that wasn’t happening over Zoom), her non-conscious expectations were probably far more robust.
And what happens when reality fails to meet our expectations? Disappointment, discouragement, fatigue.
On the other hand, when your expectations are predicated on a relationship that started with video calls, the next video call is a lot less likely to fail to meet those expectations.
Thus: less risk of overindexing for nonverbal cues.
That said…
I think there’s a limit to how completely we can conquer Zoom Drain by managing our expectations.
We are hardwired to talk to people face to face. It’s in our blood, our bones, our DNA. We are sophisticated biological and metaphysical beings with cosmic powers of communication.
Which means video calls will always cost more than we intuitively think they should. We need to be more careful asking or agreeing to get on them.
Conversely, we should re-evaluate the cost of talking to each other in the same room. In-person meetings might be a better investment than we’d like to believe.
So what?
I love remote work. I’d almost sooner die than give it up.
But I also need to invest in opportunities to share physical space with people more often — not just friends and family, but colleagues and clients. The dynamics of human connection in shared physical spaces are so rich, so deep, and so subtle that they might as well be magic.
And in our post-Covid, screen-mediated, socially-atomized world, we need that magic more than ever.
Now you
Do you do a lot of video calls? What’s been your experience?
Have you discovered one weird trick to conquer Zoom Drain?
Or, better yet, have you devised an effective pitch to convince stressed and busy people to meet you in meatspace?
Co-creating and co-hosting, technically, but it was already too many syllables.
If you’re wondering, yes, I now understand that the words “big Chinese media company” are a (literal!) red flag.
Pun eagerly and shamelessly intended.
Although you can sort of hear a lot of them.
Yes, it’s apparatuses, not apparati — I looked it up.
I’m not sure this is still true anymore, but if you were born in the last century, you definitely had this experience.
Possibly for the same reason: non-conscious grasping at weak or non-existent signals.
A tough task for someone who’s never done any, ever, at all.
So meta, I know.
Man, you nailed this one. Plus, I have a mild version of a neurological condition that makes it difficult for me to keep my head completely still for long stretches of time. So on top of all the fatiigue you described, I have to spend about 25% of my brainpower concentrating on looking normal. Wears me out big time, especially if it goes on for more than an hour.
I favor phone calls over Zoom whenever possible so that I can pace and talk. I find that I think much better and my energy levels improve. Zooms have their place, but shouldn't necessarily be the default.