I went for a walk this morning, and had a lot on mind!

So, I sit here this morning. It is Friday. Normal Fridays come with excitement as the work week ends and you wonder what the weekend holds. Will we do something adventurous like go visit Tyler? We haven’t explored Shreveport, so maybe that would be an adventure or cook and have the family over for dinner. But, this is not a normal Friday, and this week has been anything but normal for me. It seems the days start ok, I go for my “power” walk and seem to have a clear handle on the day ahead. Then I sneak off to my office and try to focus and some of the days seem to wander back into a funk.

I have social media content to write for the iSOA team, with some exciting opportunities in the API Management and Gateway arena. There is a Twitter marketing class I started but for the life of me have not re-engaged and really need to. The next class in the series is LinkedIn and I really want to take that class, but I think there is room to learn on Twitter so I need to back to it.


This morning, as I started the day with my power walk down the trail, my mind wondered and I pondered a variety of different subjects and so against better judgment I thought I would share a few of those thoughts here.

Sweden:

If Sweden achieves group immunity sooner than other countries does it matter? The sacrifice they are making is increased deaths and not flattening the curve. But, what if they achieve group immunity 6 months ahead of the rest of Europe not to mention the world. Do they have to lock their borders to stop travelers from bringing in more of the virus and causing more rounds of infections?

Facebook meetings announcement:

I wonder about Facebook getting into the digital meeting space, and competing with Zoom and others. Marc Zuckerburg promises these rooms will be secured, but secured from whom?

This will add another aspect where Facebook is actually tracking, mining our daily lives to grow their revenue and control advertisements, newsfeeds, and more. Remember, it is not the truth of content, or community awareness that is Facebook’s business. Their real business is to keep you engaged so they can keep putting ads up in front of you that they can charge advertisers and increase their wealth and dare I say power over the masses.

Future of travel: 

This is more interesting to me than I thought when I walked through the trails this morning. We have a complete paradigm shift occurring in travel. For Cruiseships to continue to sail, they will have to shift away from larger more crowded ships lesser people onboard and shift to a luxury model for those that can spend more money and will expect more on these ships. The masses are not going to want to get on a crowded ship where the greatest risk used to be a stomach virus shared and now can be a virus that will spread quickly and potentially kill many onboard.

Air travel is the next victim here. There won’t be an eager public to get on flights and get “out of town” the same way. This is not just for personal travel but business travel will shrink and I dare say may never recover. As more and more companies and industries cancel their large conventions what is the likelihood they will come back? Think about the Vegas conventions and the hoards of people going to keynote or wandering through an exhibit hall. Don’t think that will happen again anytime soon. If digital events show similar attendance and perception is they are successful, the large conventions will be far fewer and very different where crowds are seen as dangerous.

Travel, especially international travel, has helped in more ways than just commerce and industry. It has helped us understand and appreciate the diversity of cultures, people, and more around the world. If we only live a global world online where the social services exist to make money which keeps their focus on keeping you around people like you and selling more advertisements. Diversity and tolerance of different cultures will become more challenging. We only have to watch a few comments about the “China Virus” and the threats to Asian Americans to see the harm that can be caused here.

What will be the new norm, past the pandemic? 

What if the new norm means we focus more on each other, our health, happiness, and our neighbors and family. Instead of worrying about our next car we remind ourselves of the priorities that kept us sane during the pandemic such as the next recipe for dinner, or better ways to select movies for the family to watch.

What if the new norm, is we appreciate what Los Angeles looks like without smog and we accelerate green technologies like electric cars. You don’t have to argue about global warming to value clean air. I was thinking this morning about the future for Uber and Lyft. We will need more self-driving cars that get us from point a to b without exposing humans to a potential illness, accelerating change at Uber and Lyft, and possibly giving taxi companies another shot at survival. The Jetsons way of life might arrive sooner.


What if the new norm is we learn to appreciate everyone in our lives and not create a caste system built on wealth alone. We have to realize the dependence we have on people we may not have thought of in the past from the clerk at the grocery store, to the people that keep the electricity on, to those that are not just nurses and doctors but those that actually keep the hospital clean and the patients fed.


What if the new norm is that we appreciate not just the value of teaching but how hard that job is. I can’t count the number of people complaining about how hard it is to teach their own children at home and realizing how hard it must be for teachers who have many more kids in a classroom to teach not to mention how quickly many teachers have adjusted to help teach their students online.

What if the new norm is we all step back and think about the world and each other more, and stop focusing on our differences but on what has brought us together. The world has come together to understand this virus, share information, and focus on opportunities together to heal and recover from this pandemic. Instead of choosing to blame each other for world problems how about we see how much better the world is when we cooperate as we are all living on the same planet.

I do hope this is not another lost opportunity to step back and appreciate and learn to love each other instead of using this as another reason to justify us hating each other.

I know this was a long blog, and I guess I had a lot to think about this morning, but I hope you all stay safe, healthy, and find ways this weekend to entertain yourselves and your families.