Meditation for 7/21/2020: Covid-19 is accelerating human change

But no one knows what we will become

“The pandemic will change everything”.

Everyone says that now, but I don’t think people realize to what extent. Take the simple things — Zoom meetings have cut short the small ways people socialize when they get to a meeting early. Questions like “How are you and how was your birthday party?” are becoming extinct. Its hard to do that now because no-one gets to a Zoom meeting early. And only really close-knit teams feel comfy blowing the first 5 minutes on banter (by the way, a word that will soon go the way of the dodo). Oh and Laura Behrens Wu reminded me today — Zoom makes every group interaction a single conversation instead of potentially splintering into 2–3 pairs of conversations that you can easily have in a large room or at a party. It literally flattens 3 dimensional social space. Lets call it 2.5 dimensions. And 2.5 < 3 in case you were wondering. Especially when this happens for ~500m workers all at once.

If this continues, it will change the face of work and thus it will change us. Modern humans spend an inordinate amount of time at work. It’s ironic that this change will start with “knowledge workers” vs “blue collar” worker, but it’s coming for us all.

But this is an acceleration, not an inception. The change has been coming for some time. Already, mobile devices and social media have raised our ‘dopamine ceiling’. Imagine, on average, that there were potentially ~100,000 possible dopamine hits in a persons life due to love, lust, alcohol, danger and drugs. With mobile devices and social media, its closer to ~1,000,000; roughly +10x. Of course these are averages, some people will bat way above and some way below (just like before). But these changes will be very widespread, because these devices and social media are at planet-scale adoption. We have no model for knowing the impact of raising the dopamine ceiling of an entire species. I suspect we can’t even hope to replicate an experiment of that scale in mice, but we have done it to ourselves. Add the sudden changes to how we socialize at work, and you get major forces writhing under the surface of how we interact, which is a huge part of how we are as a species.

We’re probably accelerating social and cultural change in ways that will materially change us and reshape how we do things as humans.

Consequences unknown.