Our next question is from Positive. Positive says, "What have you learned during this pandemic?" That's a good question. I've definitely learned some lessons. There are some predictions I made early in the pandemic in writing, so I should maybe go back and revisit those and see what I learned. So I made a prediction early in the pandemic.

This was in GQ, I believe. This was probably in a Clay Skipper interview for GQ, where early on in the pandemic, I made the claim that probably one of the number one public health measures that we could make if we wanted to just objectively measure, especially mental health, the number one public health measure that we could probably have taken at the beginning of the pandemic was to shut down Twitter.

I was seeing the writing on the wall, and I said, "This is not going to be a source for good in the months ahead." That was prediction number one. Prediction number two, I made in the pages of The New Yorker in May of 2020, so again, real early in the pandemic.

And I said, "Look, there's going to be a lot of pain felt by suddenly remote knowledge workers, because we have been working with this hyperactive hive mind style of ad hoc on-demand work, which kind of works when we're all in the same place, but can go haywire if we're all spread out and distributed.

So I think people are going to feel a lot of pain. The hyperactive hive mind is going to spin out of control when we all go remote, and this is going to inspire us to say, "Okay, once and for all, we have to structure how we work more as knowledge workers.

We can't just rock and roll on email and Zoom and Slack. We have to have more structured processes. We have to do more Cal Newport-style world without email ideas." All right, so let's revisit those predictions. Twitter being a force of negativity, 100% correct. If you had any fondness for social media pre-pandemic, you probably have lost it all now that we're in the final stages of the pandemic.

It was an injection straight to the veins of poison for so much of the population during the pandemic. I think we also learned nuance about technology, right? I think we would, early in the pandemic, lump all of these different technologies together and be like, "I don't know technology. I need it to talk to my family because we can't visit them because of a lockdown." But we gained nuance as the pandemic unfolded that, "Wait a second, there's a difference between I can text message my siblings.

There's a difference between I can set up a Zoom meeting with my parents so that we can talk when we can't visit each other in person. There's a difference between that and I'm having a drag-out fight on Twitter with someone I've never met in Alabama, and I'm literally shaking with rage." There's a difference between Twitter and texting.

There's a difference between Facebook and Zooming. There's communicating with digital technology—thumbs up. We loved that during the pandemic. We were glad we have it. And there's social media platforms—thumbs down. I think it made us all into maniacs. So I think that prediction was right. Social media became much more poisonous, and we realized we can embrace digital communication without having to embrace yelling at people over Twitter windows.

All right, so that was a good prediction. Second prediction—I was kind of wrong. I was right in the first part. I was right about the part that the remote work was going to spiral out of control because we have no structure on how we work, and going remote is going to make it worse.

That was right. It did spiral out of control. So many knowledge workers fell into an existence where they just went from Zoom to Zoom to Zoom to Zoom. It was absurd. It was like we were in a Kafka play doing some sort of absurdist satire about the modern working life where we just did meetings all day long and never actually got to doing work.

I was wrong about the second piece of that prediction, which was, "And this will lead us to make major changes in how we work." And that didn't happen. Basically, the companies just waited it out and now are saying, "Okay, let's just get back to the office and get back to what we were doing before." What I underestimated was, yes, that was painful.

These eight- or nine-hour-in-a-row Zoom marathons that work devolved into really was pretty terrible, but there's lots of terrible things going on last year. So we were willing to—the pain of this one thing we just chalked up to everything stinks in a pandemic year, everything's terrible, we're used to things being terrible, so it didn't motivate us to take action.

So I was wrong about that. So that's one thing I learned. Moving away from these type of tech or work predictions, I think there's a bigger picture message that I came to grips with during the pandemic that's probably more important in the long term, and I think a lot of people encountered this message as well, which is the value of slowness.

So the disruption for knowledge workers, for what they would call non-essential workers, you said, "Great, I guess I'm just at home and I'm doing some Zoom and I'm not commuting to the work and I'm not traveling." There's a certain level of busyness that disappeared. There's a much bigger injection of just, "I'm here now, I'm home." For some god-awful reason, my kids are here too, they're not in school.

And it was a different type of lifestyle that we were being exposed to, and a lot of people were extracting out of that disruption that there's value, there is appeal in the human condition to slowing things down, spending more time with people that you are close to, spending more time just walking those same trails in your neighborhood because there's nowhere else to go, talking to your neighbors over the fence for long periods of time because what else are you going to do in the afternoon in March of 2020?

And of course, the right answer to that question is drink. But you know, you could drink and talk to your neighbors over the fence and spend time with your kids. Slowness emerged as something that's important. And so my whole very nascent ideas about slow productivity, about rebuilding work life, about doing less things and doing those things better, about more sequentiality, one thing after another, not a lot of things at the same time, moving from a push model of work where everyone who needs you put stuff on your plate to a pull model where you pull things from people when you're ready for it.

I think there's something here that's really important. There's something in here that could better align how we live our professional lives with the reality of the human condition. And I don't quite know how all this works yet, but it's the pandemic that got me thinking about it. And I think a lot of people got thinking about this as well because of their experiences with the pandemic.

So stay tuned for that. Slowness is my theme for 2022, and hopefully it's something we'll develop a little bit more.