Zoom has turned into a goldmine... for the cosmetic surgery industry

Plastic surgery is booming. Despite the coronavirus (or more likely because of it), record numbers of consumers are sneaking out of their homes, visiting clinics, and putting down as much as $20,000 to convert today’s version of themselves into a younger self. The number of cosmetic procedures has tripled.

The world continues to work from home, with no sign of returning to the office anytime soon, and isolation in our home offices has brought huge, often unexpected changes to our lives. For one thing, you’re suddenly spending lots of time on Zoom, where you’re in constant communication with a stamp-sized window that features … you.

It’s as if we’ve affixed tiny mirrors to our monitors. We’re suddenly watching ourselves, and we’re keenly, painfully aware of how others see us.

My question: What internal changes happen when we’re reminded, minute-by-minute, how we come across, how we talk, and how we look? Should we expect this extreme self-awareness to impact who we are?

Some time ago, a friend related an unusual experience to me. While he and his girlfriend were dining, she made a 10-minute-long visit to the bathroom. The length of time she was gone surprised him, but he didn’t say anything. Later that night, showing him something on her phone, she inadvertently revealed that during that trip to the bathroom she’d shot more than 60 photos of herself. “Why so many selfies?” he asked, and she answered, “Because I know you’re about to break up with me.”

I’ve realized that selfies are more about freezing moments than about self-obsession.

In fact, many people I’ve asked about this tell me that they shoot more selfies when they’re in a buoyant mood. Why should this be so? Because, they explain to me, they mean to save their good-mood selfies and play them back when they find themselves in their next inevitable sour mood. It’s like a battery, storing not power, but positive energy.

Shooting photos of our surroundings is no different. I can’t count the number of times I’ve witnessed the most amazing thing, only to notice that everyone around me is watching — if you can really call it “watching” — through their recording devices.

For thousands of years, our brains have stored emotions. Like me, I’m sure you’ve had the experience of having a conversation about something, and though you may forget the details, yet for some reason you still remember clearly the “feeling” the conversation gave you. I fundamentally believe that we store feelings, which are powerfully activated via our senses.

While you’re driving to the store, an amazing song on the radio takes you straight back to when you were 16 old. That sudden time-travel gave you a rush, didn’t it? Or what about that unique smell that instantly transports you to a special place, in a heartbeat turning you 20 years younger?

But as the case is with everything in our lives, it takes intentionality and effort to hold onto those feelings, thoughts, skills, and memories. If we haven’t been exercising, we feel sore when we stand up from a chair. If you store all your numbers on your phone instead of memorizing them, then suddenly — oops! — you can’t recall a single phone number.

Some years ago, researchers scanned respondents’ brains while asking them a difficult question. The subjects didn’t start by searching their brains for the answer. Instead, their brains automatically reached toward one universal answer: Google. What’s scariest of all: Their brains didn’t even try solving the puzzle. It was as if they’d forgotten that their brains were even capable of complex problem-solving.

Likewise, when we find ourselves arguing about that actor’s or politician’s name … I’m seeming his face, but I just can’t quite recall his name … within bare seconds, a genius grabs his phone and instantly call up the answer.

In the past, a question like that could have taken hours of wracking your brain, solving, guessing, discussing, remembering. Everyone around the table would have worked together to retrieve that elusive name from their memory banks. Now, they only remember Google as the answer.

Here’s the issue. It may be all very well to store our emotional highs, via selfies, in a cloud; but what happens once we’re disconnected? What happens when your husband passes away, it never occurs to you to renew your iPhoto storage subscription, and all your precious photos are irretrievably, eternally lost? What happens when, faced with that Zoom photo every minute of the day, we super-analyze ourselves and decide we don’t like what we see?

What happens when that stamp-sized photo grows bigger and bigger in our minds (even while getting small and smaller on everyone else’s screens).

We find a shortcut to fix it all. For a lot of people in the last few months, plastic surgery has been the shortcut. But sometimes shortcuts are just that: shortcuts. They aren’t the ultimate answer.

The answer to solving the problem might be found elsewhere. The solution may be to return some of those fundamental, less shiny, less fancy, more time-consuming aspects into our lives. And with that, we may create the counter-balance that all of us are so desperately yearning for.