Living in the Future
Welcome!
This weekend was my first plane trip since the COVID19 pandemic hit the United States in March 2020. Over the past year, like with many people across the world, my visits with my family have mostly been via Zoom and phone calls, as my parents and siblings live three hours away by flight or sixteen hours by car which makes traveling a necessity. However, this past year and a half has made me grateful to live in the time we do now.
Every once in a while I have these moments I call "Holy shit, we live in the future!" moments. They're when I take a moment to think about how something that seems so mundane to us now - like running spreadsheets at work or sending a video of our dogs to my partner - is such a modern innovation. For most to our species history we relied on our brains to calculate information for us and speaking to others in close proximity to get a message across. Hell, even written language is a fairly recent invention considering the timeline of us homo sapiens. Imagine explaining to a caveman or cavewoman that we can now fly through the air in giant tubes and send our "visions" across the globe (also we'd have to explain to them that the Earth is indeed round) with palm sized rectangles to each other. Even going back to pre-industrial revolution days these ideas would be considered considered absurd.
Throughout the pandemic I would say "it's never a good time to have a pandemic but of all the times to have one this is the best time" and I think that many have thought the same thought. As we began to shut down everything we began opening up with video calls and online games like Among Us. Even in my sheltered distance I was still able to connect with my family with Thanksgiving and Christmas day Zoom calls. Nobody in our history as a species could be so fortunate to see, or even hear, their family from far far away. So even though I haven't seen them in a long time I still felt connected despite everything.
As I write this I'm flying through one of those giant metal cylinders in the sky after seeing my family, in a plane piloted by people who understand the curvature of the Earth and I can pay just a meager eight bucks to connect to the internet and prep this newsletter. Not once in our history could we be so fortunate to prosper off of millennia of innovation. So as much as the world changed since 2019, we can still be thankful for living in the time we do now.
Project Updates
From the Webb
Flash Fiction
The Horns of Lochrane - The wind storms are coming, and the horn's blow their ominous warning.
From the Lab
Day Books - Listeners of The Productivity Lab and readers of this newsletter know how much I enjoyed reading Refuse to Choose by Barbra Sher, so it's no surprise that in the latest episode of TPL Mark and I decided to put one of her topics to the test. In this episode Mark and I test out daybooks, a system all about exploring ideas and capturing inspiration as they come to you and (of course) planning projects. Give it a listen.
Recommendations
YouTube
In Our Nature - I love science YouTube if there's a science youtuber out there I've probably watched them or at least heard of them. Joe Hanson of It's Okay to Be Smart and PBS Digital Studios is one of those people. Joe's videos are usually well produced and researched, but lately he has been hitting it out of the park with his latest In Our Nature series. In the series Joe is joined by Emily Graslie of Brain Scoop and Trace Dominguez a producer at PBS Digital Studios. In the series they talk about the intricate workings of ecosystems from across the globe and how they work from the bacteria in the soil to the apex predators. I recommend starting straight from the beginning.