Today, it’s nearly impossible to build anything in San Francisco. Infrastructure projects balloon indefinitely. In 2001, the city proposed a new bus lane on Van Ness, one of the main arteries. Nearly 20 years later, the new lane’s opening is slated for 2021; Van Ness remains a mess of potholes, equipment, and detours. It wasn’t always this way. In the 1930s, the Golden Gate Bridge was built in three and a half years. To commemorate its completion, as an encore, the city created an artificial island in the middle of San Francisco Bay. Treasure Island took under three years to finish.
Well, if you’re anything like me, you’ve tried a lot of things because you had some kind of result you wanted to achieve. And, if you’re anything like me, that was always why you stopped.
Don’t let guilt get in the way of understanding and being a part of humanity. As I so distinctly experienced and shared, I felt stunted and numbed to the point where I, as a writer, couldn’t write about any of the disasters of this pandemic. I started every conversation with, “I’m so lucky in the grand scheme of things…” and “There are so many that are worse off than I am.” But that guilt prevented me from putting myself in the shoes of others. There are going to be drawdowns, low points, periods of depression and anxiety. We are all being impacted differently, which means that we are all going to need to handle this differently. That is OK, and that is necessary, even.
But what really takes my breath away is how out-of-touch the daily debates on the internet were — “the discourse,” as some of us were taught to call it in college. Among the things the pandemic has clarified for me is the decadence, as my colleague Ross Douthat has described it, of our old culture war. Many of the battles of the past decade now seem self-indulgent and stagnant; others a waste of time.
Unless you’re watching a panel discussion, it’s usually impossible to look at everyone in a group during in-person interactions. Typically, your gaze rests on the one main speaker and then everyone else is in the periphery or even behind you. But thanks to the glories (and more concerning attributes) of Zoom, you can see everyone all at once, along with one person you never usually observe—yourself.This creates visual overload because when we look at a screen, whether it’s a computer or a TV screen, our minds are accustomed to processing what is in front of us as a unified whole. But a Zoom meeting in gallery view isn’t one unified whole. It’s the equivalent of trying to watch 5, 10, 20, or more different TV shows, side-by-side, meanwhile checking a mirror to see how you look. This is incredibly exhausting.
Most companies have reacted to a new all-remote existence with a mandate to “over-communicate.” That has paid dividends in the early weeks, but for some has now led to a nonstop deluge of video calls that — let’s be honest –could simply be emails or Slacks. (Or even, phone calls!)
Tiny little inconveniences and provocations are going to drive us crazy. Kierkegaard put in his diary once: “I can cheerfully struggle against a storm... , but the wind blowing a speck of dust into my eye can irritate me so much that I stamp my foot.” The smaller the affront, the more upset we get - because what we’re actually upset about is our inability to cope.
One of my favorite memories from the early days is of Joe talking to an engineer/designer who was working on an update of the homepage literally a few days before a major launch. She was asking for feedback on what she thought was a complete homepage. Instead, Joe offered, “build something the internet has never seen before.”
You can see that market reset in another way in two big industries that people have spent decades dreaming of moving to digital and to remote - health and education. Both of these are very obviously now in the same period of forced, accelerated adoption and experimentation, but they are also short-circuiting many of the barriers to adoption and experimentation that have made both industries graveyards for innovation and company creation for a decade or two.
“I think a lot of it will remain this way after this crisis,” said Beccy Baird, a senior fellow at the King’s Fund, a health care research charity. “What’s really key is that we don’t lose patients’ ongoing relationships with a group of professionals at their home practice.”