My 110 dear followers have probably noticed that I've been inactive at Publish0x since March (well, at least I'd love to think that they've noticed that). The reason of my silence is very simple -- that shitty COVID-19.
No, I'm still standing. Actually, for the moment my situation is pretty good. Though my country is in COVID top charts, neither me nor any of my relatives are sick. Though the industry I work in has been hit pretty heavily, I kept my job position with only a small cut in working hours and wages. Today I "work from home", four paid days a week (instead of "normal" five days) and an hour or two of net working time a day. In other words, I actually work like two hours a day at most, but my employer pays me for the whole eight hours, imagine that! When I watch news on TV and compare myself to others, I feel kinda lucky!
When I watch news on TV and get sick of all the bullshit those talking heads pour on me, I think of the lessons COVID taught us, the humankind. The lessons are mostly unpleasant, but interesting.
The first and foremost, COVID taught the humankind to wash hands regularly. Yup, just that simple, literally. It turned out that we, the humankind of the XXI-st century, need a pandemic to learn washing hands regularly and not only in the morning and after piss or poo... Well, at least, handwashing skills can be acquired rather easily.
Another lesson is "work from home" myth. Yup, some jobs can be done "from home", "remotely", "over internet", etc. You can code remotely, you can do legal consulting remotely, you can make translations or teach math remotely, you can even post shit on Publish0x remotely. But you can't remotely fix a water tap. You can't make bread, grow potato, make spaceships and build roads remotely. Today's economy is still a dirty-hands-on one. When there's no simple dirty-hand-made bread in supermarkets and you can't even buy it from China with drone delivery -- pretty soon noone will give a shit for any remote consulting lessons and writing articles over internet.
Also COVID reminded us what we, the humankind, should give a priority to if we want to survive till the next century. It should now be clear that no muftis or dalay-lamas, no politicians, no pop-stars, no best NBA players will help us when the next pandemic begins, the next asteroid falls, the next Ice Age comes (yes, it all will happen, literally, astronomers, climatologists and Mr. Taleb can probably guarantee you that). Technology is the only way for us, the humankind, to survive, in the most primitive sense of the word. Not a sure way, but the one worth trying because there's no other way to get meaningful outcomes. In other words, when you're coviding, a bad tomography is more helpful than any prayer, twitter campaign or popsong bullshit.
I mentioned politicians above, they're an interesting thing too. It seems today's politicians (at least, in the countries frequently talked about on TV) have took Mr. Brzezinski's "chessboard" idiom too close. They think themselves grandmasters moving political figures across meridians and parallels. Or better yet, they're like boys playing toy soldiers while mother is away and promoting themselves to generals and field-marshals. Then a virus Terminator comes and doesn't give a shit to all their memorandums, treaties, Deputy Prime Ministers meetings, bureaucratic paper monsters, and even special forces. Those smarty guys a bit failed to fight the illness but quite successfully ruined the world economy, and only COVID's relatively modest fatality/mortality conceals how helpless our world's political structure (and technology, for that matter) is. Simply substitute COVID with Ebola, imagine 12,000,000 dead by now, and think how your hometown would look like then...
Ok, that's almost enough.
I would only like to talk about a lesson COVID taught to me personally. Well, actually I'd heard that lesson thousands of times in my life, but it's only now I could feel it. Above I mentioned that I didn't write anything since March when all COVID buzz started. I simply have no time!!!1 Yes, remotely working a couple of hours a day and running a family of three locked in a small apartment consumes all my time... When I think about opportunities I missed during these months because of lack of time I understand that time is the most valuable asset (at least, from financial point of view) in the world. When a second is gone -- all the world's money can't buy it back. And vice versa, you can make a billion out of 1 buck while sitting still on your ass -- provided that you have enough time for that. Well, "Time is money is a trivial bullshit", you might say. Well, you're right. But strangely, it took me several decades of life and a pandemic to actually learn that triviality...
Ok, that's really enough. I'd like very much to talk about my findings in Prospectors game, my Splinterlands inwastements, DeFi researches, my guru-ish feeling, cabbages, kings, etc., but my free time is over for now.
Stay safe!
Cover photo by cottonbro
