It’s not always going to be like this

This post is going to be a cool experiment. I am writing it on 14 June 2020. The world is knee deep in a terrible Coronavirus pandemic. Everything is upside down. You are reading this a year after I wrote it to see if my thinking held true for the last 12 months. Wish me luck!

There is a human bias called recency bias. Basically it is our tendency as humans to place a higher weight in decision making on things that have happened recently. We park all the other information we have from the past and all other knowledge we have that could help predict the future. We focus purely on what just happened.

My best example of recency bias now right now is that phrase “the world will never be the same again”. Considering that humans innovate and change daily I don’t understand why this is really news? Did they not notice that they haven’t been moving around in a horse drawn carriage and using smoke signals to communicate? I call this out as a bias because we are living in a world that is unfamiliar and having to solve many new problems we have not been called on to solve before. However, figuring out a technological or medical riddle doesn’t mean that all other aspects of human life have become irrelevant. There are improvements in technology for sure but we will still eat, we will still breathe and we will still sleep. Heck I think it’s possible that we will still want to socialise face to face, not matter how advanced Zoom becomes.

Remember the quotes that told us that by this day China would have overtaken the US economically? Still waiting. Remember the prediction that by now there would be a world war caused by a lack of water? It suddenly gained momentum when Cape Town and a few major cities worldwide were running out of water in 2017/2018. Remember when Bitcoin peaked at around $20000 and how there were predictions that “soon” money as we know it would become irrelevant? I challenge you to go to downtown Harare, Mumbai or LA and try and purchase your lunch using Bitcoin. Don’t forget to pack some food 😉

Basically things are extremely bad right now. Millions of people have been infected by COVID19 and many have died from this terrible disease. Many people have lost their jobs and many people are desperate. However, it won’t always be like this. Things will improve and as a minimum there will be change. Humans have a creative knack for finding ways to get out of horrible situations. There will be boom times again. We will start focusing on irrelevant trivial things like reality shows and social media filters again. Many of the world’s people will be pulled out of poverty again just like what happened between 1950 and 2000 in India and China.

It’s damn tough now, but it won’t always be like this! A wise economics professor once told me that where you are today, is not a predictor or where you will be tomorrow. Just like when the good times come, that is also a not a guarantee that they too will last forever.