Dull grind is the perfect way to describe the feeling of the hamster cage that your home has become. It feels like being stuck in a bad relationship. In the beginning it was still exciting, innovative, and so – crazy though it sounds – interesting. Sadly, the initial flames of enthusiasm soon die down. Escape feels impossible and costs more energy than going along for the ride. So that's what millions of us are doing right now. We haven't chosen to be in the corona crisis, just as no-one chooses to be in a bad relationship. But we have chosen to a greater or lesser extent to live in a global society, paving the way for the spread of COVID-19. And this has reduced all our lives for the time being to the size of tiny 10-inch screens. Everyone who ever claimed in 2019 that we were spending too long staring at our digital screens could never have imagined how drastically our screen time would have increased in 2020. Where our social contact formerly came from get-togethers with colleagues, dinner dates, sport clubs, going out for drinks or day trips, now it all has to come from that little screen. The expectations are pretty high. “Any questions?”, the same question echoes through another of my lectures, that afternoon. Followed by a deathly silence. I see the 22 faces that look at the screen now and again. I can't look at them personally to engage them, so I move on to the next part of the lecture. One student interrupts me with a question after all. At first I thought he was just asking a question to be kind. After all, the silence is even more painful in Zoom. But it was a good and relevant question. I was relieved: something had happened that is difficult to see using our modern technical resources. Incredible communications innovations have taken place over the centuries. With every new resource at our disposal, we have grown used to discarding another layer of our humanity. The letter lacked the empathy of a face-to-face conversation. The telephone call did away with the effort that it takes to write a letter. Of course we missed the non-verbal clues, but we could gather a lot from the intonation. With the coming of text messaging and WhatsApp we were once again able to hide a lot of what makes our communication so human. This time from the safety of our keyboards. At most we use an emoji to express something of this human layer. Stripped of our social interaction, as we chat together it feels like 90% of the communication has to be filled in by the recipient. And although all these forms of telecommunications have their advantages, this period shows only too clearly what we have lost over all the years.