The silver lining
Well, I don’t particularly mind being a doomsayer myself. It’s a rather pleasant thought exercise on what’s the worst that could happen. You do live as a pessimist, your relations avoid you, your family life is compromised and your future prospects tend to be bleak.
However, you are normally pleasantly surprised on what didn’t happen. Which is good. And I surprise myself being optimistic about this pandemic. Curiously so. For as much as I and everyone I know doesn’t matter, some people do. Poorly expressed. What I mean is that upon YOUR death. Or mine. Or that of EVERYONE I know. Our names will not merit a page in the history books. That’s all I mean. And, by history books, I obviously mean wikipedia.
On the other hand, some people do matter. For better or for worse. Hitler, for example, mattered. For the worst, obviously, but imagine him in quarantine in the middle of a pandemic in 1933 and it would have been rather difficult to host Nazi party rallies. True that he wrote his pamflet while imprisoned but that’s a different story.
But I am referring to guys such as Galileo, Gates, Newton, Page, Einstein, Darwin, Jobs, Bezos or Zuckerberg.
Pulling Back Genius
The funny thing about our society is that we very rarely pay geniuses to think and create stuff. We are too focused on getting them to work for a living. So we tax them with rent, grocery shopping, new phone purchase urging, sports team winning distracting or going out to find a suitable genetic partner to mate with and pile on the responsibilities.
The evidence is out there. Einstein wrote his Nobel Prize-winning theorems in the long pauses between dusting off documents and shifting papers from one desk to the next in the Patent Office. Newton invented Calculus while London was engulfed in a plague. Gates came up with MS-DOS while sucking at the tit of mum and dad. In the garage. As did Jobs, by the way, with the Macintosh.
Mark came up with Facebook in college, while being sustained to study and drink. Scratch that, get drunk. Elon sold his first game as a child. Not as an employee or an entrepreneur. His responsibilities at the time included making his bed, taking out the garbage, walking the dog and putting his clothes in the hamper. That’s all.
Enter COVID19. Bunker everyone indoors. Send the world into disarray and, with the economic disaster looming, we now have quite a few millions of people brooding in their own filth at home. Doing nothing but being bored. Sure, with mortgage payments and financial bankruptcy a couple of months away for them, yes, but with nothing more than time on their hands.
Hardly ever before we have had so many people, with so much access to information and self-development tools, and with so much time of forced outside inactivity. The fruits of this are going to be seen a year to five years from now. But if I make it until then, I am sure the things, apps, solutions, developments or advancements are going to be just fabulous.
Something to look forward to
We could be looking at someone finally cracking the mystery of viable fusion, or solid state batteries. Both would immediately solve our energy issue… and upend the oil based economic, political and warring system…
Or come up with the deep learning solution to combine the data from drivers around the world and produce an AI engine that works better than humans at driving and flying.
Perhaps a dating app that actually matches you up with the person you truly want instead of the viable rod-receptacle the Tinder’s of the world currently provide. Further, how about a Universal Basic Income demonstration that we can ignore?
We have plenty of coders doing home plant growth experiments. Aquaponics, hydroponics, aeroponics, etc. Will some of them come up with a viable solution for community self reliance? It would certainly reduce food cost and ease supply chain pressure.
Most certainly, what will come about is the wife/husband/partner/kids entertainment app. Not sure how it will work but it is going to be a phone one that will instruct you what to say to put the rest of your family at bay for a couple of hours. Here is how I would do it:
- Assign the unique identifiers of the phones in the family to a unit
- Analyze media consumption patterns on these phones based on Facebook, Instagram, Twitch, Tiktok, Twitter and Youtube
- Deep dive into contacts the family members interact with, or not so much
- Define strategy that will keep the user occupied for X amount of time
With this, the free app will give you strategies to get rid of your family for 30 minutes, longer periods are premium.
What a great time to be alive. And staying home. I, since in all likelihood belong within the “don’t matter” group of people, am wasting away watching F1 videos of yore, and playing GO at low settings. But that’s completely irrelevant.