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Lockdown 2
Thursday 2nd April 2020 @ 12:02 pm

Lockdown is not what I imagined.

Previously if I had to imagine a scenario where I would be housebound, it would only have meant one thing. I would be ill. Perhaps recovering from an operation, perhaps crawling through an ailment, perhaps even fighting a disease that normally carries a person to death? These were the likely scenarios.

How wrong I was.

Unforeseen circumstances that were so unforeseen that they were unimaginable are not the purview of the modern western imagination. In fact, the cry of the Modern World of the last 300 years has been constant progress.

Progress, progress, progress.

Get better, get smarter

Have more foods for the populations

have more work for the multitudes

have more education for the masses

have more health, wealth, housing and connection for the crowds.

Keep on getting better.

Have more robots do more things for us,

and more plastic to pay for it all.

 

Don’t get me wrong – I am fan of what the Modern world has brought us

I enjoy TV

I am writing these words on a MacBook (sponsorship Apple? No? Oh well)

I will share it with you in a way that should the entire world want to read it (I’m glad they won’t by the way) over half of them (3billion) could.

That’s a massive amount of change in a quick period of time.

Think of it like this, in the year I was born Atari created the first commercial computer game – Pong! [Look it up teenager] In this last year, the video game industry accounted for over $150(US) BILLION. That’s more than the music and movie industries, combined.

The kids who were born the same year as Facebook haven’t reached college yet. If Facebook were a country, it would just have moved itself into the top half world economies by GDP – it is 16 years old.

 

The period of my very very very brief lifetime has seen incredible, unimaginable (to most of us) and incredibly swift change around the world.

It is unlikely to stop.

Imagine if we have the same rate of change for the next 20 years, as we had for the last 20? Actually, don’t – that’s the point, most of us cannot imagine what is possible. When I was starting my first job, the phone stayed plugged into the wall when I went home at night. It was absolutely unimaginable to me then that by the time I reached middle–age I would carry a phone in my pocket – much less a phone on which I could write a report, book a flight, check my bank balance, pay the bill at my shop, gather the family together on small multiple small screens, or heaven forbid actually remember to call somebody.

Strange times.

Strange times have us sitting on top of the wave on hundreds of years of constant progress, having no other option in the face of plague than to separate from each other and cocoon ourselves away. Alone. Isolated. Estranged. Hiding away when ill, suspecting everyone around you of being diseased. These are the things of history books, of medieval draconian measures. Of bells tolling and ‘Bring out your dead.’

We have stepped backwards, necessarily so, in the face of nature doing what nature does. Fight for survival.

Separating the lepers is the only way we know to amble on.

At the very least, these incredible times (at one moment amazingly interesting and at another time unimaginably horrific) are showing us that we can face things we couldn’t imagine. And that, at least, should give us pause for thought.

 

Gee I’m glad I have my iphone.

(Sponsorship Apple? Still no?)


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