It’s Easter Monday. Did you have a good Easter? I did.
Maybe what is happening is an acid test for politicians. I think that the number of deaths in each country will be an indicator of how good they are at managing complexity, and consequently it will likely predict how well and quickly national economies will recover. From this perspective, it’s not a surprise that populists, who tend to offer simple (and wrong) solutions to complex problems are the ones struggling most.
There’s no going back. There never is: we always go forward. We won’t be able to recover the meals in restaurants, the walks in nature, the hugs we did not enjoy in the last few weeks. But we will have more meals, walks and hugs in the future.
There’s a narrative about “going back to normal” which I don’t find very helpful. Change happens all the time, sometimes slow, sometimes fast. This is definitely a time of very fast change, which gives us all the opportunity to improve faster. Or to fuck things up faster.
In the last few days:
- I “went” to a birthday party
- I “had lunch” with my family on Sunday
- I spend a whole day without uttering a word (except for maybe an “hey Siri”)
- I helped fix remotely our Ikea smart home system.
The Zoom birthday party was an amusing experience, with an incredibly interesting and diverse group of people who would have never met in real life. I ended up staying for almost 3 hours, which is about 170 minutes longer than I expected. I realised that what makes these gatherings different from the in person kind, is that only one person at the time can speak. Which should make them worse, but it didn’t.
Stay safe, be nice, keep in touch.