ON TIME

December 2020

What an exceptionally weird year.

Amidst the considerable confusion and suffering being experienced, I cannot help but feel that I am gratefully and at the same time regrettably disconnected from large swaths of it.

But, I am optimistic.

Not hopeful, often misconstrued with optimism. I am optimistic that 2020 will have jolted people to recognize their lack of participation in their own lives. To shake away loose affiliations, standards, and expectations they might have had.

The life you are waiting for won't come. The life you have is here and now. Don't miss it waiting for something better.

😷 FAMILIA(L/R) TERRITORY

As the pandemic progresses on, I've been observing how people have been responding to the worldwide stress. Many, rightfully so, are beaten down having relied upon a life, partner, or job (or its perks) to sustain themselves through these odd and difficult times. Society has been brutalized without doubt.

Perhaps you are feeling distraught, helpless, or ambivalent by the time that is being stripped from us all at the moment. The uncertainty and relentless taxing of energy wares down the reserves of patience, gratefulness, and temperament we might have stored. It's OK to feel depleted and, to an extent, broken. I can tell you with certainty it will pass despite being a grueling process.

For me, it has been a weird familiarity. Wearing masks and social distancing is nothing different for those that work in hospitals, or are around people prone to infectious diseases. While I did not wear masks all the time inside the infusion rooms at Stanford Cancer center, it was a common occurrence as a simple and effective preventative measure to keep safe those who were undergoing treatment.

For months I was in bed or in an infusion chair watching time pass, wondering about the things I was supposed to do, things I was supposed to accomplish, that I would most likely never do. I played back everything I regretted and how I would have treated people differently. I was trapped in a state of sedation, between the drugs killing me and those keeping me alive, with little say in my circumstances.

In the late 1990s, my family and I had moved to Singapore where the SARS outbreak would shut down my school and keep us quarantined. As a child the focus of life is far narrower and so the idea the "snow day" equivalent happening in a city that was 80 degrees with 100% humidity daily was welcomed.

I did not know at the time how effective the Singapore government was at identifying and responding to an epidemic. Overnight there were temperature readers at airports, entrances to hotels, and masks, which were already a common article of clothing in Asia. They weren't just ahead of the curve, they were more community oriented understanding that protecting one's own safety was not the limit of their obligation to society nor the requirement of their humanity.

When I moved to Bangalore in 2015 I spent the next year and half in a form of solitary confinement. I was an outsider in the country and within the company, too old to be in some circles and too young to be in others. I couldn't speak the language(s). Most of my days were spent thinking and building projects at Flipkart or at my flat playing Call of Duty on a PS4 Mizono persuaded me to purchase. We played games together zero times.

It was not by any means a bad thing to be alone because it taught me how to be alone. Grateful, even, for being alone.

And so, in a stroke of randomness in life, I have been well practiced in quarantining, social distancing, and spending time positively in solitude. Combined with the intensity of operating a startup going through immense transformation and growth — with both savings and a paycheque — I have skirted the direct destruction the pandemic has produced in life, money, stress, anxiety, health, and hope.

It has heightened the value of time for me. And as people pick themselves up when this entire saga is over (and it will certainly end), I hope it does the same for them, too.

We all yearn for that normal life once again. We forget how quickly that life was passing us by.

↩︎ WHERE TO WHEN

My broader approach to thinking through the pandemic is that unified leadership in this country is a requisite to the three layers of recovery: (i) Biological (ii) Psychological and (iii) Economical.

The first step in stabilizing society leads with basic biological safety. Is there acceptable risk to interact with many people regularly? Understanding how we will even reach this question with possible answers has been troublesome.

In a somewhat sad state of affairs as a "rich nation," this is untrue in my opinion despite the ongoing pandemic. If you are labour worker, such as a waiter or cashier, you will interact with dozens to hundreds of people a day while making minimum wage that varies from $5.15 (thanks Wyoming) to $15.00 (thanks D.C. which is not even a state nor has representation in our Federal Government). The Federal Minimum Wage (FSLA) is $7.25 in 2020, and those roles which are tipped can be paid as little as $2.13.

These types of jobs oftentimes do not come with health insurance nor benefits and information that would assist a low-income earner in accessing such needs. They are replaceable assets who require little training for which the system has been optimised to their churn rate. The adage of "it's 10x more expensive to get a new customer than keep one" is not true. And yet, these people are subjected to the highest exposure of physical ailments, paid the least, and then denied their own tax dollars by the Senate they elected.

A different disease for discussion another time.

Much of my study in mathematics was around probabilistic models. How to understand what will happen in populations given events and probabilities over periods of time. There are many ways to stop a pandemic — quarantine and any associated physical transmission deterrent work because we isolate a disease such that it is unable to replicate in other hosts. One way to accelerate this biological safety effect is through broad vaccination of a population (reductively lowering the P(Transmission)).

In the USA, our commitment to individual rights (loosely defined and poorly enforced) hasn't allowed us to use quarantine or even masks as a simple and effective stopper. Vaccines offer a way to reach biological safety as a population by teaching immune systems how to effectively combat COVID-19. The intent is to kill the virus within our body before it can transmit (a trap of sorts). The idea of Herd Immunity was generated as a way of describing vaccinations success, not, from what I can tell as an alternative to vaccines (a lesson Sweden will learn in body bags).

Our society must understand the risks of vaccination cannot be isolated. We are always making a trade — and the safety of a community is at risk from a single unvaccinated child or adult. The tricky part is those that don't like vaccines are highly correlated with those who don't want to wear masks or quarantine. In essence, they are asking to become and to successfully spread disease. Depressingly, many of these people will kill their loved ones through their selfish impulses and likely claim ignorance.

The other challenge is our government is no longer trustworthy as a unified entity to protect the "Welfare" of the American People. This is not because they need to be right 100% of the time, but because the communication and instruction to the American people has been incomplete and at times purposely misleading.

The haphazard leadership which has created confusion and divide at state and local levels, slowing down an effective and durable response to this pandemic, but also future ones too. The additional toll (read: deaths) is difficult to understand. When we read things like "3,100 Americans Dead from COVID-19 Yesterday" do we understand the gravity of what it means and whether that is acceptable?

On September 11th, 2001, nearly 3,000 people (mostly Americans) died. For that toll, in a single day, the country and many others entered a war going on 20 years. On December 7th, 1941, around 2,600 people (mostly American military personnel), died at Pearl Harbor. In response, the US entered WW2 which culminated in the vaporization of around 225,000 (likely more) Japanese civilians in a few seconds across three days.

What should be our response if these triggers were occurring every day?

Our sluggish and dysfunctional response has protracted the biological recovery period which I believe won't be meaningfully achieved until Q3 2021. Vaccines, even if widely propagated, take two months to fully manifest and will take time to distribute and be accepted (science, politics, religion, and stupidity all playing an important role).

It is at that point we can begin to move on to (ii) Psychological safety recovery of a brutalised society. Human social interaction is a basic need, and even those practiced in lowering its requirements will be troubled over the course of 10 or 20 months. It is why so much of our human space exploration programs have critical psychological studies and tests for people we put in cramped and isolated places for long durations of time (San Francisco is a great astronaut training ground).

For the Empaths amongst us, this pandemic can only be described as a perfectly designed hell of loneliness and emotional suffering. Even when this comes to pass, and perhaps after a small fad of "the Summer of Love 2021," the effects on our society — mistrust, pain, forced introspection will take decades to understand and (if required) unwind.

The time alone for many was welcome as people could simplify their lives. Time became more abundant without commutes. Then even more abundant without jobs. Infinite even, for those who no longer live. I'm doing my best to build up a well of patience and understanding for everyone in the world as we all rise from the sustained and penetrating anxiety we have endured during this period.

The (iii) Economic safety recovery is not tied to how much your $TSLA stock is worth. It's about the lasting ramifications of destroying millions of businesses that were not tied to the extraordinary wealth generated by digital business builders and those countercyclical to pandemics (health operators as one industry).

My Mom spent 25 years building a travel agency business that has supported every aspect of our family's cash flows and kept a roof over my head, food in my stomach, and education in my brain. It vanished in 3 months.

There are many ways to explain the financial and economic ramifications of such loss. Economists are paid (and most shouldn't be) to pontificate on these matters to no end.

She came to the USA as a former first-class air hostess and rebuilt her love for travel in the most classic American way in starting a business and employing other Americans (mostly women). Was this her calling in life? Probably not. But she, along with my father, was responsible for a family in a foreign place which meant putting in honest work. And what took 9,100 days of bruising perspiration evaporated in one-hundreth of the time.

Few economists understand what that means beyond their charts and textbooks.

My best guess for a general recovery is Q4 2023. What does it mean, always, to recover? It will likely take that long to even begin to understand what was taken from us: our time.

If there is anything to be gained from these unusual and turbulent waters it should be that our society treats our greatest asset, time, with great contempt. You might celebrate today to bring in the New Year, but the opportunity within each day is the same.

It's only our evolving interpretation of that truth that holds us back.