What Have You Learned During the Pandemic?

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00:00:04.720 | Our next question is from Positive.

00:00:06.480 | Positive says, "What have you learned during this pandemic?"

00:00:12.320 | That's a good question. I've definitely learned some lessons.

00:00:18.720 | There are some predictions I made early in the pandemic in writing, so I should maybe go back

00:00:24.320 | and revisit those and see what I learned. So I made a prediction early in the pandemic. This was

00:00:30.400 | in GQ, I believe. This was probably in a Clay Skipper interview for GQ, where early on in the

00:00:36.320 | pandemic, I made the claim that probably one of the number one public health measures that we

00:00:45.360 | could make if we wanted to just objectively measure, especially mental health, the number

00:00:50.400 | one public health measure that we could probably have taken at the beginning of the pandemic was

00:00:53.360 | to shut down Twitter. I was seeing the writing on the wall, and I said, "This is not going to be a

00:00:58.720 | source for good in the months ahead." That was prediction number one. Prediction number two,

00:01:03.360 | I made in the pages of The New Yorker in May of 2020, so again, real early in the pandemic. And I

00:01:07.920 | said, "Look, there's going to be a lot of pain felt by suddenly remote knowledge workers, because

00:01:15.680 | we have been working with this hyperactive hive mind style of ad hoc on-demand work, which kind

00:01:21.760 | of works when we're all in the same place, but can go haywire if we're all spread out and

00:01:26.720 | distributed. So I think people are going to feel a lot of pain. The hyperactive hive mind is going

00:01:29.760 | to spin out of control when we all go remote, and this is going to inspire us to say, "Okay,

00:01:35.440 | once and for all, we have to structure how we work more as knowledge workers. We can't just rock and

00:01:39.680 | roll on email and Zoom and Slack. We have to have more structured processes. We have to do more

00:01:44.560 | Cal Newport-style world without email ideas." All right, so let's revisit those predictions.

00:01:50.640 | Twitter being a force of negativity, 100% correct. If you had any fondness for social media

00:01:58.400 | pre-pandemic, you probably have lost it all now that we're in the final stages of the pandemic.

00:02:04.560 | It was an injection straight to the veins of poison for so much of the population during the

00:02:11.760 | pandemic. I think we also learned nuance about technology, right? I think we would, early in

00:02:19.440 | the pandemic, lump all of these different technologies together and be like, "I don't know

00:02:22.960 | technology. I need it to talk to my family because we can't visit them because of a lockdown." But we

00:02:29.120 | gained nuance as the pandemic unfolded that, "Wait a second, there's a difference between

00:02:33.680 | I can text message my siblings. There's a difference between I can set up a Zoom meeting

00:02:39.440 | with my parents so that we can talk when we can't visit each other in person. There's a difference

00:02:44.560 | between that and I'm having a drag-out fight on Twitter with someone I've never met in Alabama,

00:02:53.920 | and I'm literally shaking with rage." There's a difference between Twitter and texting.

00:03:00.160 | There's a difference between Facebook and Zooming. There's communicating with digital

00:03:03.760 | technology—thumbs up. We loved that during the pandemic. We were glad we have it.

00:03:07.840 | And there's social media platforms—thumbs down. I think it made us all into maniacs.

00:03:14.720 | So I think that prediction was right. Social media became much more poisonous, and we realized

00:03:18.400 | we can embrace digital communication without having to embrace yelling at people over Twitter

00:03:25.920 | windows. All right, so that was a good prediction. Second prediction—I was kind of wrong.

00:03:30.400 | I was right in the first part. I was right about the part that the remote work was going to spiral

00:03:36.080 | out of control because we have no structure on how we work, and going remote is going to make

00:03:39.440 | it worse. That was right. It did spiral out of control. So many knowledge workers fell into an

00:03:44.160 | existence where they just went from Zoom to Zoom to Zoom to Zoom. It was absurd. It was like we

00:03:48.160 | were in a Kafka play doing some sort of absurdist satire about the modern working life where we just

00:03:53.280 | did meetings all day long and never actually got to doing work. I was wrong about the second piece

00:03:57.600 | of that prediction, which was, "And this will lead us to make major changes in how we work."

00:04:03.040 | And that didn't happen. Basically, the companies just waited it out and now are saying, "Okay,

00:04:08.160 | let's just get back to the office and get back to what we were doing before."

00:04:10.560 | What I underestimated was, yes, that was painful. These eight- or nine-hour-in-a-row

00:04:16.640 | Zoom marathons that work devolved into really was pretty terrible, but there's lots of terrible

00:04:22.800 | things going on last year. So we were willing to—the pain of this one thing we just chalked up

00:04:28.240 | to everything stinks in a pandemic year, everything's terrible, we're used to things being

00:04:31.680 | terrible, so it didn't motivate us to take action. So I was wrong about that. So that's one thing I

00:04:35.920 | learned. Moving away from these type of tech or work predictions, I think there's a bigger picture

00:04:41.920 | message that I came to grips with during the pandemic that's probably more important in the

00:04:46.880 | long term, and I think a lot of people encountered this message as well, which is the value of

00:04:52.800 | slowness. So the disruption for knowledge workers, for what they would call non-essential workers,

00:04:59.840 | you said, "Great, I guess I'm just at home and I'm doing some Zoom and I'm not commuting to the work

00:05:03.600 | and I'm not traveling." There's a certain level of busyness that disappeared. There's a much bigger

00:05:10.240 | injection of just, "I'm here now, I'm home." For some god-awful reason, my kids are here too,

00:05:15.840 | they're not in school. And it was a different type of lifestyle that we were being exposed to,

00:05:21.520 | and a lot of people were extracting out of that disruption that there's value,

00:05:27.840 | there is appeal in the human condition to slowing things down, spending more time with people that

00:05:35.520 | you are close to, spending more time just walking those same trails in your neighborhood because

00:05:40.880 | there's nowhere else to go, talking to your neighbors over the fence for long periods of

00:05:45.600 | time because what else are you going to do in the afternoon in March of 2020? And of course,

00:05:51.440 | the right answer to that question is drink. But you know, you could drink and talk to your

00:05:55.200 | neighbors over the fence and spend time with your kids. Slowness emerged as something that's

00:06:00.640 | important. And so my whole very nascent ideas about slow productivity, about rebuilding work

00:06:08.800 | life, about doing less things and doing those things better, about more sequentiality, one

00:06:12.800 | thing after another, not a lot of things at the same time, moving from a push model of work where

00:06:17.440 | everyone who needs you put stuff on your plate to a pull model where you pull things from people

00:06:21.280 | when you're ready for it. I think there's something here that's really important. There's

00:06:24.880 | something in here that could better align how we live our professional lives with the reality of

00:06:30.400 | the human condition. And I don't quite know how all this works yet, but it's the pandemic that

00:06:33.760 | got me thinking about it. And I think a lot of people got thinking about this as well because

00:06:38.160 | of their experiences with the pandemic. So stay tuned for that. Slowness is my theme for 2022,

00:06:44.240 | and hopefully it's something we'll develop a little bit more.

What Have You Learned During the Pandemic?

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