The pandemic has affected many things beyond basic health. Increasingly, I see research showing meaningful increases in pornography consumption, suicide rates, and a host of other trends that are shaping our world today ... but, in the longer-term, it is also affecting the face of tomorrow.
Flexible Workplaces
In May, after only several months of lock-down, I was surprised how many businesses decided that they had no intention of ever requiring their employees to come back into the office.
As we close in on a year in the pandemic, I am surprised how easily we adapted to the new normal. Even with a vaccine in sight, I suspect many of the adaptations will remain.
Personally, I like going to the office. Most days, I still do ... even though a tiny fraction of our people are there.
With that said, I know that our business matured. We are better at the skills, tools, and mindsets that make remote work possible or profitable. We've gotten better at deciding what's a meeting (versus an e-mail or an online chat). People are working hours that are more comfortable for them, and we see meetings happen both earlier and later than they used to, before the quarantine.
As a macro trend, we also see a flight from urban centers.
via visualcapitalist
I keep hearing about people moving far from their work-places. Ultimately, they decided that remote work enables a new form of freedom for them – to live where they want, regardless of what they do (or who they do it for).
Over time, I'm curious how a remote workforce will impact the quality and the amount of work done.
Adding to my initial concerns, flexible workspaces cause (or exacerbate) other issues, including cybersecurity, digital collaboration, defining the new workday, and a host of other challenges.
Digital Explosion
I remember the early 2000s and the distress I felt watching how many time cycles my son "wasted" being on his phone (which to me, at that time, seemed like "all-the-time"). But, in retrospect, that was nothing.
Flash forward to 2019, and everything was even more "digital" and "smart." Refrigerators, exercise bikes, billboards, and more all had screens, and 2-year-olds were already digitally literate. "All-the-time" took on a whole new meaning.
Somehow, the pandemic still took our reliance on the digital world (or our augmented alternate reality) to the next level.
via Alaska DHSS
Kids are also getting less physical activity and human contact, and spending much more time online. Contributing to this is the reality that much of their academics have been forced online. Likewise, adults also are shifting more of their attention and activity cycles to the digital world.
Continued screen-time increases coincide with video game revenue spiking and Internet traffic increasing by more than 50% worldwide.
As the world opens up, I still expect digital reliance numbers to stay above pre-COVID benchmarks. People's reliance on digital to feed their need for information, entertainment, and companionship is growing.
Changing Business Landscape
Starting with consumers, we've seen a massive movement toward frictionless and touchless payment. Even physical stores are prioritizing getting in and out without having to deal with another human. In addition, there's a massive move toward delivery services for groceries and meals.
On top of the changes to normal retail services, reliance on online shopping has increased, while the time it takes for electronic purchases to your door has decreased. Combined, these factors will terraform commerce. Consequently, this year was likely an inflection point for e-commerce penetration ... and, from that perspective, life will never be the same again.
via visual capitalist
Despite the growth of online retail, many small businesses that couldn't move online are struggling, and many have already gone under.
Which leads to the next trend ...
Increasing Wealth Stratification
While small business owners and front line workers have been struggling, billionaires saw their wealth increase by over half a trillion dollars.
Part of this is due to government aid toward large companies, part of it is due to tax laws, and part of it is due to the digital rise mentioned in the previous section. The big tech companies were already thriving, and the pandemic created a positive inflection point.
Despite those gains, the pandemic hit millennials and small businesses hard.
via Morning Consult
The longer the economy is affected by COVID-19 measures, the larger the wealth inequality will grow, and the more people you can expect looking for government assistance. The strong will thrive while others will suffer increasingly from learned helplessness.
Obviously, the 2020 quarantine has created impacts in many other areas – including family stress, community isolation, political radicalization, etc. Moreover, these effects won't be isolated to this year - and we should expect many to impact our "new normal" for years to come.
Some people consider this a challenge. I think it's the playing field. It's going to be true for everyone. What you make it mean, and what you choose to do, it is up to you. Some will be like a cork, floating on the water, going where the tide takes it. Others will recognize the situation as an opportunity and thrive.
The impact has been global, but the choices you make are local ... and they are still your to make.
Here is to making 2021 our best year yet!
Onwards!
Language Is A Limitation
Words are powerful. They can be used to define reality, obscure reality, or create reality. Words can be constructive or destructive ... uplifting or demoralizing.
In a sense, the power of words is seemingly limitless. But that power cuts both ways. Language is also the cause of many of our problems.
We created language to aid social interactions and to facilitate our understanding of the world. However, language also remains a constraint in how we perceive the world and a limitation on our understanding of new things (e.g., ideas, advances in technology, etc.).
Before I go into where language fails us, it’s important to understand why language is important.
Language Facilitates Our Growth
Language is one of the major keys to advanced thought. As infants, we learn through watching our environment, reading faces, and learning to infer things from body language. As we begin to understand "language," our brains develop faster. In this context, language isn't limited to the spoken word – intelligence grows with the catalyst of language, whether it's vocalized or not.
It's this ability to cooperate and share expertise through language that has allowed us to build complex societies and advance technologically – but it is becoming an increasingly inadequate tool as the world becomes more complex.
Language as a Limitation
In Buddhism, there's the idea of an Ultimate Reality and a Conventional Reality. The Ultimate Reality is the objective nature of something, and the Conventional Reality is tied inextricably to our cognition – heavily influenced by our language.
Language conveys cultural values and biases, personal values and biases, and influences how we perceive “reality.” Linguistic differences create a wedge between various political groups – even when people probably want similar things. In these cases, differences in language and perception create strife (rather than define it).
We use language and our past to sift and categorize existence into heuristics instead of exploring the true nature of things (in part because if you're trying to survive in the jungle, shortcuts increase your chance of survival by saving time and energy ... and accuracy is secondary to survival).
On the other hand, when you're trying to expand the breadth and depth of humanities' capabilities, those same heuristics become shackles (or at least blinders). Ultimately, they can lead to issues like groupthink and echo chambers that limit not only innovation but communication.
Look at groups like Democrats v. Republicans or Israelis v. Palestinians. In reality, there are more similarities than differences. Nonetheless, on a day-to-day basis, each of them focuses more on their differences than finding collaborative solutions for life's tougher problems (or focusing on the things they do agree upon).
Throwing rocks at our enemies also counterintuitively makes us feel better and promotes in-group unity. The problem is it comes at the cost of progress and true unity.
This is not to say that there aren't real (and important) differences between those groups. It simply recognizes that part of the problem is our willingness to accept "get-to-next" compromises rather than seeking understanding and committing to coming up with real and complete solutions.
Humans Are The Real Black Box
People often refer to Artificial Intelligence as a "black box" - because the complexity and coding of the algorithms, etc. make it mysterious to a layman. But, Artificial Intelligence is programmed; it is precise and predictable. It is only influenced by the coding used to create it and the data fed to it; this creates its own form of transparency (and bias).
Meanwhile, humans are nuanced and (to some extent) non-rational creatures. We’re prone to cognitive biases, fear, greed, and discretionary mistakes. We create heuristics on previous experiences, and we can’t process information as cleanly or efficiently as a computer.
When humans explain their own behavior, they’re often inaccurate - what we hear is more likely a retrospective rationalization or confabulations than a summary and explanation of the choices they made.
All-in-all, it results in a lot of confusion in trying to understand world events, each other, and even ourselves.
Conclusion
I have friends on both sides of the political divide in America, and once you get past the rhetoric - there's a lot more in common than it seems. Excluding extremist groups, most are looking for unity, the "truth", and solutions to the problems in front of us.
Conflict is often a symptom, not the disease.
On a smaller scale, inside my company, I focus on creating a universal lexicon for our "intellectual shortcuts" because alignment starts with shared understanding. If the language I'm using means something else to another team member, even if we think we're moving toward the same goal, we'll slowly stray further and further apart.
As a practical matter, spending too much time moving away from each other (or measuring the distance we are from each other) creates a self-fueling irritation that becomes increasingly annoying, and ultimately caustic.
Today's problems can't be fixed purely with semantics and semiotics, but they are not bad places to start.
If we start from a place of agreement and common desire to pursue something worthwhile, the distinctions will call us forward rather than pull us apart.
I hope this helps. Let me know what you think!
Posted at 04:51 PM in Books, Business, Current Affairs, Healthy Lifestyle, Ideas, Market Commentary, Personal Development, Science, Trading Tools, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)
Reblog (0)