Opinion | You Can Still Have Happy Hour. Just Do It on FaceTime.

In this time of increasing social isolation, gathering to stave off loneliness will be one of the most important forms of virtual gathering. Meaning and connection are easier to create, particularly virtually, through specificity and structure. Worried about canceling your 5-year-old’s birthday party? Host it on FaceTime, with her three best friends, creating homemade Paw Patrol crafts from the same shared printout.

Torn between hanging out with people virtually and finally reading a good book? Try inviting a group of friends (or strangers via Twitter or Instagram) to read one book together, in its entirety, aloud, a practice I learned from German theater groups. Want to go deeper with your friends? Digitally host a series of evenings, call it Seven Songs, where each “guest” gets an evening to share and play aloud the seven songs that have most shaped them. Don’t cancel those milestone birthday celebrations. Instead, gather online, all of you, and pay tribute to Grandpa from afar, in real time, perhaps inviting him to share a story and a lesson from each decade. There are ways to keep yourself and others healthy without killing your spirit.

It’s already happening. We’re living in a time of virtual happy hours and virtual dance parties, virtual choirs and virtual “breath connection,” virtual church services and virtual potlucks, virtual quarantine Shabbat and virtual sobriety meetings. The Japanese have even coined a term, “on-nomi,” for drinking online with friends.

Many of us will be quarantining with others: roommates, children, partners. As you gather with yours, think about the ways of making meaning together at home. Rather than checking out, check in. Perhaps it’s a nightly ritual of answering one question from the “36 Questions That Lead to Love” list. Or tuning in together for the Metropolitan Opera’s free “Nightly Met Opera Streams” or the National Gallery of Art’s new daily live tour. Or start a family book club, or podcast-listening session or game night.

There are, of course, groups, including distributed global companies and disabled communities, who have long been meaningfully connecting from afar. Mo Carter, an employee of Automatic, has hosted online happy hours, farewell breakfasts, four-hour work-alongs where they “all just worked and chatted as we felt like it,” even a 24-hour Zoom memorial for a colleague where people came and went and shared stories.

As the coronavirus wreaks havoc on many of our bodies and on our collective life, some of the get-togethers being canceled will not survive this situation. And that may, in a strange sense, be a good thing. Others will take on new forms. This spell will force us to focus on what matters — and decide what that is.

Instead of being what Sherry Turkle, an M.I.T. sociologist and psychologist, has astutely termed “alone together,” we have an opportunity to be creative with the digital tools that previous generations couldn’t have imagined.

During this unpredictable and painful time, let’s invent creative, meaningful ways of being together apart.

Priya Parker is the author of “The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters.”

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