If you're serious about going beyond lip service re: the recovery, and parleying it into serious change, your first task is not predicting the future, envisioning scenarios, or compiling your radical change agenda for shock-doctrine implementation. Your first task is mapping.
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Until you have a good sense of the base layer of newly acquired habits, and newly lost habits has __already shifted__ and how much and in what ways it will shift you're not ready to shape its further evolution.
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And note that habits are being lost as well, due to lack of reinforcement. Like, going out to eat rather than getting take out feels strange. That might be semi-permanent for me. Might not be going out as much. Just as I stopped writing paper letters once I got on email.
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But it's not ALL bottom-up. Many people make that mistake when there is a groundswell of Big Bottom-Up Energy going on changing the canvas. Bottom-up tends to run out of steam at the level of larger patterns.
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Left to itself, for example, if "make your own breakfast burritos" is one of the big shifts, will not bootstrap into a new supply chain for burritos. It will take higher level more deliberate actions like an entrepreneur recognizing it and (for eg) starting a meal-kit business.
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Stewart Brand pace layering idea is good here. The bottom layer has shifted. With different time constants everything above it will shift. Some shifts won't be complete for a decade or two.
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Some big second-level things already happening. Secular shift towards WFH for example, is a key enabler for locking in many of the new habits.
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Replying to @FriedKielbasa
Remote work is here to stay to a much bigger degree than people realize. Many big companies have already announced permanent move in that direction. Many have already packed up and moved to entirely different cities as a result, burning their bridges for a daily commute...
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Others have acquired weird new optionality and time constants. I now own hair clippers, and wife has mastered giving me a decent enough haircut that even if I go back to hair salons, it may be less frequent, and the option will last at least as long as the clippers.
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And don't underestimate the factor that many people are having 3 simultaneous realizations:
1. There IS an alternative to X
2. They can master the skill for X
3. They actually like alt to X better
Preferences are shifting, not just habits.
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This particular effect has the psychological quality of dozens of small red pill/enlightenment moments in every lifestyle. It's not a single big false consciousness/learned helplessness pattern breaking down. It's a lot of little ones acting together.
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Replying to
My buddy once called this "the unreasonable effectiveness of small optimizations" and that's what we're all doing right now. I wrote a newsletter about that idea several years ago. It's a very powerful idea breakingsmart.substack.com/p/the-unreason
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The biggest (and frankly, most exciting) aspect of this is that there is a secular "grain" to a LOT of the habit shifts that is already evident: away from consumer culture, and towards diy/maker/hacker/prosumer/producer culture. Also reuse, repair, repurpose, etc.
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This is not being driven by sustainability and climate activists, or driven by concern for the the toxicity of consumer culture or the moral superiority of a stronger diy type culture. It's being driven by necessity, will stay out of preference, but will have a bigger effect.
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The thing about all this diy stuff is that it shifts preferences at a hugely important meta-level: time vs. money and the quality of life equation.
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When people discover that their time-money tradeoff curve has more elasticity than they thought, because new skills make the time-cost of things much lower, and supply chain vagaries make the time+money cost higher, preference for more money over more time shifts significantly.
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This is the home edition of the build-vs-buy decision-making that all businesses are very familiar with. It is the consumerization of build-vs-buy decisions. For most people, for most kinds of domestic consumption, build-vs-buy decisions were not even available. You had to buy.
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So all the business process skills that businesses learned in the last 40 years -- outsourcing vs. insourcing, build vs. buy etc. and unwittingly taught a lot of their employees, are now being applied at scale in homes.
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All these are kinda good from the pov of a lot of values/mission-driven perspectives (climate, sustainability, retreat from financial productivity/yield as the driving legible metric of the economy), but it is important to note that it doesn't actually "belong" to any mission.
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So a key mistake you will be tempted to make is to interpret the shift through just one values lens. Do that and you'll be disappointed. Maybe 70% of the shift will align with climate action, but 30% won't and you'll be tempted to knee-jerk fight that or eliminate it as noise.
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The changes are at what I call the log level, and are a shift in phenomenology of lifestyle variety at population scale. Supervening narratives will necessarily reductive. The idea of supervenience is good to get comfortable with for thinking this through
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People's habits are changing --> their identities are changing --> how they fit into any story you craft will change
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