COVID-19 And The Future: A Selfish Gen-Z Perspective
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The world is on fire right now.
I’ve seen society ablaze with panic before in my life, but never to quite this degree. That probably has something to do with the fact that I’ve only existed on this planet for a little over 23 years — not even a quarter of a century. Most of the people reading this will probably laugh out loud at the fact that I was only born in 1997: “What the hell does this kid think he knows about the world?”
I’ll answer that question for you.
I know that I know very, very little about tragedy and societal panic and global meltdown. But the fact that I am aware of how clueless I am, in conjunction with my youth and the fact that this virus is disproportionately fatal to people well outside my age bracket, puts me in a rather unique position where I’m not worried about dying any time in the near future any more than I was a couple of months ago. I’m focused instead on what the world will look like when this crisis eventually subsides and how I can prime myself to be ready for it.
You could reasonably argue that this is a selfish, insensitive perspective to take at a time like this. To some extent, you’d be right. My rebuttal is simple: what’s the alternative? I can say with at least a moderately high level of certainty that I will be infected if I’m not already, and that I will be asymptomatic or experience mild symptoms that will relieve themselves within a couple of weeks of onset. I have isolated myself in my home as recommended to keep the spread of the virus minimized, I will get myself tested for it as soon as the United States stops sucking at healthcare and emergency preparedness, I am practicing social distancing, and I wash my hands a lot.
I refuse, however, to internally stress myself out beyond reason about an apocalypse that no one can reliably predict. Because frankly, all that will do is force me into a hellish mental landscape where I am unproductive, stressed, and generally making poor use of this rare abundance of “free time,” that’s been forced upon all of us. Instead, I am using this period, however long it ends up being, to consider how best to ready myself for what society will look like whenever and however this whole thing abates. As such, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what the future may hold for us all, and I’d like to share some of my theories and conclusions here.
The Dawn of Our Remote Work Future
My first, “real,” job was a role at Apple working as a technical support representative. I got that job in June 2017, long before the general public had ever heard the term, “coronavirus.”
It was a remote job. And it was awesome.
I was a more productive, happier employee than I’ve been at almost all the places where I’ve worked onsite.
I could roll out of bed in my pajamas and be at work in about 30 seconds if I slept in late.
My commute involved walking approximately 5–10 feet within the confines of my home, which freed up my time, my wallet, and my carbon footprint.
I had my own private bathroom at all times.
I could leave to run errands nearby during my lunch break so that I had more time to unwind after work was over.
I could go on.
Based on my experience, the so-called, “problems,” associated with going remote from a business perspective are largely nonsensical.
No, employees don’t just loaf around if they don’t have other people constantly watching them because, surprise surprise, when you employ someone and pay them to do work, they generally would rather do that work so they can guarantee their job security and earnings than risk losing all that for the sake of being able to catch up on their Netflix queue.
No, it’s not impossible to promote and grow a workplace culture just because you can’t chat in person at a water cooler — plenty of remote-only companies know this and can attest to it.
And yes, companies can save absolutely heinous quantities of money by downsizing their headquarters and focusing on maintaining a distributed workforce.
As far as I can tell, all the half-hearted arguments against remote work stem from the fact that if you have a workforce that knows firsthand how much better it is in every possible way to work from where they individually desire, suddenly all the 60-story office buildings in major metros that cost a fortune to build, maintain, and lease are empty. And that is a genuine problem that poses a lot of questions from multiple angles. Here’s a handful:
- If everyone goes remote and office buildings are no longer needed or can be minimized from their current size and scope, what do we do with all these monolithic structures we’ve built for the sole purpose of being places of gathering for workers?
- If anyone can work from anywhere, how does the human population change in terms of how it’s dispersed across the globe, and what effect does this new diversity have on different countries’ infrastructures and cultural makeups?
- If nobody needs to live in major metros or the suburbs just outside of them to make a living, what happens to property values in these areas? (hint: they crash through the floor).
- How does this change in property values and the new reality of people at any income level being able to live anywhere with an internet connection affect the global economy on both a macro and micro scale?
- Is the world’s home broadband infrastructure actually capable of handling an exponential increase in people working remotely through the web? If not, could internet access finally become a public utility?
- How do the average human worker’s values and desires change, both professionally and personally, if they’re no longer tied to a single place to earn their income?
- What about service workers who can’t do their jobs from behind a screen? If populations are so decentralized, how do people in the service industry maintain a consistent income in any single location?
These are all very big, very important questions. And it’s looking like we’re about to have to answer them very soon whether we want to or not — everyone with the capacity to work remotely is being mandated to do so all across the globe as companies try to do their part in minimizing the spread of COVID-19. If we all spend the next few months being effectively forced to realize how much better it is in every single way to work remotely when possible, what happens when people are told to come back to the office at the end of the crisis?
I think it’s reasonable to say that we’re all about to find out.
It’s about time we did.
The Death of Retail, For Real this Time
We’re all undoubtedly sick of hearing, for what feels like forever, about the impending death of retail. We all have been aware, just based on common sense and fifth grade-level statistical analysis, that retail is on its way out of existence — I personally can count on just one hand the numbers of times I have visited a store for anything other than groceries in the past year.
With COVID-19, a significant number of these retail chains are about to be dealt a fatal blow after teetering on the edge of collapse for the past several years. Social distancing and quarantining is more than likely going to be the norm for at least the next few months, which naturally means that going shopping just for the sake of shopping, an activity that makes up a major part of the remaining lifeblood of these chains, is going to be a no-go.
While I hate to add to the years-long clamor of people yelling, “THIS is it, it’s HAPPENING, retail is FINALLY going to die and [XYZ] is going to be the FINAL nail in the coffin!” I’m still going to do just that. Coronavirus is about to destroy a lot of the retail sector in an unprecedented way.
While I personally don’t mind this from the perspective of a consumer, it is certainly going to be an alarming development in other ways: I have many, many friends who work in retail and do not currently have plans to change careers. Just like service industry workers would face some serious problems in a remote work future, retail workers would face issues if their employers suddenly bit the dust en masse.
With this idea in mind, we can go perhaps even a step further. If we see massive unemployment take hold (which it undoubtedly will, for service and retail workers as well as everyone else… a recession is inevitable, if not already occurring), how does our world adjust itself politically? It’s well-known that within the US, young people have far more progressive views than what we’ve gotten used to in this country over the past few decades. As these already strongly left-leaning people grow up and become more politically active during a time of tragedy and economic recession, how does the political makeup of our country and the proposed role of our government potentially change?
I have some ideas on what the answer to that question may be, but I’ll keep them to myself for the time being.
A New Generation of Riches
“Be greedy when others are fearful.” -Warren Buffett
A couple of days ago, it was reported that Amazon is looking to hire about 100,000 new workers as it is hit with unprecedented demand that it cannot currently meet.
Meanwhile, most of the rest of the global economy is tanking. The president of the US just declared that he is seeking a 1 trillion dollar stimulus package to hopefully keep the economy afloat. The idea of sending every American adult a $1000 check is suddenly being realistically considered. Layoffs are almost certainly about to start coming in waves.
As we dive headfirst into what I firmly believe will be a global recession, as the elderly who own the greatest quantity of property and have the highest overall net worths of our populace are tragically struck with COVID-19 and have their wealth redistributed, as entire industries die or come alive or restructure to adapt to our world’s new realities, one truth becomes crystal- clear to me: a new generation of riches is about to begin developing.
While 99% of us are focused on surviving and keeping our lives at least somewhat together during these trying times, the other 1% is playing an entirely different ballgame: they’re watching stocks crash through the floor and thinking about which ones are going to come back most explosively when the recession subsides. They’re doing this because they know that if they invest now, when everything is on fire and no one is watching, they’ll be sitting on giant piles of cash when the market inevitably recovers.
If retail is dying, then e-commerce and delivery partners like Amazon and FedEx are probably going to grow.
If remote work is our future, then companies that have been remote-first for a long time already are about to become hotbeds for new talent.
If a metropolitan exodus is about to occur, then property values in those places will certainly crash, but property values in the areas that people migrate to will skyrocket.
These are the thoughts running through the minds of people who, unlike the rest of us, have plenty of money to play with during these times. Those of them who are the most wise and have the most good luck will be the newly minted, “rich folk,” of our world. And that wealth-building process is starting right now, right under our noses.
To be clear, these are just some broad, high-level thoughts I’ve had as this pandemic unfolds. I could expand on just about every point I’ve made here ad nauseam as well as introduce about a dozen other big-picture ideas I’ve had (and I may do just that in the future), but there remains one overarching truth that I think we all need to keep in mind as we navigate our current reality:
Nobody really knows what’s going to happen next.
It’s certainly a scary fact to realize and accept, and there’s a lot of very different ways to take it.
On one hand, we could run down the panic route and predetermine our own individual and societal collapse by stressing and reacting to the point of no return.
Or, we could consider the millions of other possibilities that exist, just a few of which I’ve described here, and ponder how we could adapt to them in the future.
The question, at its core, is simple: would you rather wait for destruction, or plan for rebuilding?
I’m choosing the latter, every single time.
