What the coronavirus tells us about ourselves(Part 4)
With the vast number of layoffs going on globally, the group of people that seem unaffected by this, are self-employed entrepreneurs, freelancers and software engineers who are capable of remote work.
Our dependency on corporate and organized work has come at a cost.
Whether this pandemic leads us into a more decentralized work environment, will be highly dependent on the success of remote work. Hopefully, we do make this switch, as it becomes more obvious that there exists an asymmetric relationship between organizations and people.
The absence of social interaction makes it difficult to gauge how effective you are at something. I mean how good are you really at playing that guitar you just picked up. It becomes clearer with every passing second that we are good at something when we have an objective measurement of our abilities. Human interaction provides such a measurement, a feedback loop of sorts. While isolation may result in us building our own feedback loops, as well as increasing our self-competence, creating an environment such as this is no easy feat.
We are all focused on this invisible virus that has so dramatically changed our lives. I have never heard of a situation in which humanity has been singularly focused on the defeat of a common enemy.
When the pandemic first broke out, it wasn’t journalists who first rung the alarm; it wasn’t our politicians, and in many cases, it wasn’t even authoritative world organizations like WHO. It was, however, people like Bill Gates— who had warned us about 4 years ago that this could happen. Even more recently, it was Tech VCs and software engineers reporting on the issue on twitter. The ability to see exponential growth rates is something most of us lack. If we are to progress as a society, we need more people who are capable of discerning data, and who rely far less so on analogy.