Clever

While I was out today, I came across some young people having a socially-distanced "picnic" of sorts. They'd all showed up at a movie theater parking lot, spread beach towels out on the pavement, with a good ten to fifteen feet between them and chatted with each other.

It was a clever adaptation to the circumstances. And I found myself wondering how many other clever adaptations to the world are out there, but that we may never know about, because they've been foreclosed by The Powers That Be. And I'm not just referring to government. There are a lot of forces that are interested in only having the status quo change in ways that they are familiar/comfortable with, and cleverness is sometimes neither familiar or comfortable.

The world is going to need a lot of cleverness in the coming months and years. But I wonder if the willingness to let go of comfort and familiarity in order to nurture cleverness will be there. It's unlikely that we'll remember 2019 as the last year in which prizing efficiency over resiliency was the accepted wisdom. In order to get things back to any semblance of "normalcy," there will need to be system that is highly efficient at distributing resources (as opposed to our current one, which tends to be an efficient consolidator of resources). The instinct to hoard will have to be pushed back, and that will likely result in a lot of people feeling stressed and unsafe. It will be a challenge for the greater society to deal with.

I look forwards to seeing how that challenge is met.