Oh, how fun it was.

Locked down and locked in, we suddenly had an easy, breezy way to communicate. It was called Zoom, and it meant that, like our Neanderthal ancestors, gathered around the fire, we could sit around a high-tech campfire and share stories without ever leaving our caves.

Too bad the fire went out.

"Video-call-induced exhaustion" is the scientific name for what ails us. The scientist who named the condition is Jeremy Bailenson of Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab. (And don't you wish you could interact with virtual humans? These real humans are making us coocoo!)

According to a recent article in The Washington Post, Bailenson sees four reasons behind the Attack of the Zoombies.

The number one cause is "an excessive amount of direct eye gaze."

"During a video call, everyone is often staring at the speaker and the listeners, whereas in-person, some people may glance at their notes or lean over to a colleague for a side conversation," says the Post article.

This is true. It is also true that some people may fall asleep, slip off their chairs, slide under the conference table and not be discovered for days. (These people are called executive vice presidents, but that's another story.)

"There's also the constant self-evaluation," the Post says. "Seeing our own faces and gestures several hours a day on video is stressful and taxing." This is especially true for someone like you, so good-looking you can't help but compare yourself to the other Zoomers, triggering feelings of pity for everyone who doesn't look as good.

(Note: you can click or unclick something or other to activate Zoom's "Hide Myself" feature. This option means that everyone else can see your face, but you can't. Seems like a great loss to me.)

"Video chats also cut down on people's ability to be mobile," the Post article reports. "Instead of walking and talking like you might be able to do during a phone call, video chats mostly force participants to stay in a fixed position."

Of course, spending a few hours after work at the Kit Kat Klub can also put you in a fixed position. The medical term for this condition is "comatose." Still, if you are used to getting up from your seat and scribbling out your brilliant ideas on a whiteboard, this is difficult to do in a Zoom call. It's also difficult to do if you don't have any brilliant ideas, so let's call it a wash and move on.

A final cause of Zoom fatigue is that "video calls may increase cognitive load, meaning more mental effort is needed." This seems unfair. Just when you've almost mastered the skill of walking and chewing gum at the same time, you now have to learn with a new set of technological skills, such as how to escape from a waiting room, or when it's safe to mute your manager.

Should you display your high-tech ignorance for the sake of adding your brilliant comments to the meeting flow? It's a quandary. As Cyber-Hamlet would put it, "To Zoom, or not to Zoom? That is the question."

My contribution to Zoom therapy is the "speak-up fake-out." You unmute yourself and seem to speak enthusiastically, but actually, you're just miming the words. This will throw everyone in the meeting into a high degree of confusion, especially as your gestures increase in intensity and it is clear that whatever you are saying that no one can hear is something about which you feel passionate.

The result is that the IT department is called — and blamed — while the meeting is postponed to another day.

There is a limit to how often you can do the "speak-up fake-out." After 10 or 20 times, your manager will probably figure out that whatever is wrong, it isn't the technology. But it should give you a nice respite from Galloping Zoomophobia before your head explodes.

One solution that another professor, Andrew Bennett, offers to extinguish Zoom fatigue is to find time for the "'informal chit-chat' or smaller side conversations that used to organically occur during in-person situations."

Be careful. More than one side conversation has cost the participants their jobs when it was revealed that everyone in the meeting could hear every word. Considering your grasp on technology, it's a big risk.

Personally, I recommend you stick with the program until the Zoom team improves their product. The day the company offers a button you can click for virtual footsie is the day all our Zoom problems are solved.

Bob Goldman was an advertising executive at a Fortune 500 company. He offers a virtual shoulder to cry on at [email protected]. To find out more about Bob Goldman and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: Concord90 at Pixabay