Keep On Keeping On
May 19, 2020 in bliss by Dan Gravell
Should I feel scared? Panicked? Protective? Angry?
When a collective event occurs, especially one that not only affects a town, a state or a country but even the entire world, it’s tempting to reach for shared metaphors and memes. There seems to be comfort in consensus. The trouble is, said shared memes are often seeded in a way that does not reflect the reality for everyone.
Conventional media, for example, is made of a small subset of individuals who have a different experience of life to many of its consumers. In reality all experiences are lived through an individual’s perspective and so aligning this with collective experience can be disorientating. How to remain open-minded enough to accept that others can be deeply affected by developments even when life appears to be going on regardless?
And so it seems the past couple of months, since the UK lockdown began, have been something of a confusing normality, at least on the bliss project. Revenue has not fallen; in fact it has slightly risen, aided, I guess, by a lot of people at home with time, and a messy music collection, on their hands.
For me, individually, there has been little change in my day-to-day existence. My wife, on the other hand, has shown a quite inspirational ability to metamorphise from an office-bound charity project worker to a teacher, almost overnight (aided by support from our childrens’ schools). Our children are at home permanently and thus that’s the main change I experience; in most ways this is a good thing as they do make better conversationalists over lunch than the cows in the next field.
I have also been unable to visit some of my favourite cafe surfing haunts, but that is a small price to pay. I hope they make it through this period.
Others working on the bliss project, like Vuk in customer success and Waqqas on backend metadata services have also been able to keep things going, so the cogs of the machine are pretty much working as normal.
If this pandemic period has been characterised by normalcy, for the bliss project, it’s tempting to think that the outcome will be similarly ordinary. But we don’t know what reactions there will be to this period, and we definitely cannot predict the consequences of political and economic actions, and so the best I feel we can do is position ourselves so we are adaptable and able to react to change.
So for now, and hopefully this is not a case of plan continuation bias, we’re going to continue cranking out the releases (a new beta just went into testing) and working on other new projects (which I hinted at in my last post). Wherever you are, however the novel coronavirus pandemic has affected you, thanks for your continued interest in our project and we hope you are well, or have gotten well. Keep On Keeping On.
Photo by Franck CHARLES on Unsplash.
