Happy Easter, do not let the perfectionist in you paralyse you

Happy Easter, everyone! In these strange times a lot of us are trying to be more productive. We all get those days when we experience some kind of block on our productivity. It’s so important to eliminate as many of those obstacles as possible. If there was an additional step to writing this content right here, I would probably not finish it. The perfectionist in me has a paralysing effect on my ability to be production, to write, to create content. The thing I have to train myself to do is to connect my head straight to my hands so the work flows straight onto the page. I am sure I am not the only one. We all have mental gatekeepers that prevent us from taking certain actions, and if you are a content creator, all that doubt it creates for you about the quality of your content will probably lead you to spending days or weeks making sure that you have something that is in the perfect condition, only for that content to not connect with the audience, which unfortunately is an important metric at the end of the day. Do not punish yourself for the perceived lack of quality and instead understand the basic truth that the audience you are trying to connect with is a a fickle lot and you never truly know what connects - it all ends up being a numbers game in the end. You have to think about the barriers that are stopping you from doing what you want to do, right now, regardless of the perceived low quality of your content. There are reasons why some Tech YouTubers and podcasters use the same equipment they used five years ago. By keeping the production value low, the quality of the product is diminished but you add spontaneity, and more importantly, you never fail to produce.

A new PS5 Controller and putting away childish things

Sony made a strange announcement about their new generation console, teasing us with a BMW i3 inspired controller, with a slick dual tone design. This, combined with the news of the release of Modern Warfare Season 3 in tandem has led me to the realisation of a simple fact: I couldn’t care less about video games any more. It’s a weird feeling, because there may still be a day when I want to pick up a controller (what will controllers look like in the future? What cars would their design be based on?) and play a first person shooter, idling in my living room, or training myself to get better in the hopes of being a Twitch streamer (if Twitch is still around…), but right now, I know that there are more productive ways to spend my time. Mine is a lost generation of gamers who spent a lot of our time playing first person shooters without the opportunity to get rich the way gamers today could. There were still wealthy gamers, but there wasn’t the same amount of money in the game, much like modern footballers, earning an order of magnitude more money than footballers in the past. There were millionaire footballers back then, but now even the worst premier league clubs pay their players seven figures. Simply put, video games did not provide me and other gamers a legitimate career back then and now I’m properly past it. There are better hobbies, and better ways to waste your time. Even making stupid TikTok videos would probably stand me in better stead for the future. So be it, then, it’s time to put away childish things, permanently, for now.

Cruising into recovery in the post corona world

I haven’t been on a cruise for over a decade, because, you know, I’m not a retiree. Not that cruises are just for old people, there is actually a compelling case for why cruises should appeal to everyone, including young people. It’s like a much more comfortable version of a sleeper train, or the glamping version of backpacking.

Why carry everything on your back when you can just leave everything in your travelling hostel? Why go interrailing through landlocked Europe when you can just go to the nicest port cities around the Mediterranean? It makes even more sense if you’re in America, and you’ve got the ability to stay on a floating hotel whilst travelling around the Caribbean.

So it should come as no surprise that a company like Carnival Cruise will be able to make a case to young people in the long term, and should be able to recover in a post corona world. Yes, at the moment it’s a terrible idea to go on a floating hotel, with narrow corridors and spaces intended to be packed with diners and audience members. but hey, how’s that different to buildings on land?

I know people who works on cruises and it’s a close knit crew, so sure, having so many people working in close proximity is not a good idea, but people staying in their rooms? I mean, there are lots of balconies, after all. So Carnival stock will likely go back up because people will take cruises again. A lot of reputational damage has been done to the idea of the cruise, but I would make an argument that if airlines could recover, and they will recover, then so will cruises.

People will fly again, less people, sure, but it will survive. People will want to travel again, less so, but they will do it. Make sure everyone’s health is monitored whilst on a cruise, make sure only healthy people can get on, but you can’t fly without going through an airport, and security and health checks is not exactly perfect there either.

This is an opportunity for us all to ponder when industries, despite the conventional wisdom, will actually recover, and I can tell you that working in architecture, I worry a lot more about the construction industry as a whole than I do about the travel industry.

Coronavirus has stopped us spending most of our lives in the dark

It feels like summer already. Right now, in April, the UK is getting the same amount of sunlight as the summer months, when the sky is bright until the late hours of the evening, and a blue blanket lights the city streets until 10pm. In Hollywood, they call it the magic hour, and in this one and only aspect, London can feel like Los Angeles. Magic hour, or blue hour reminds us what we missed in the winter months, the ability to actually experience sunlight. As many of us have experienced, most office jobs require us to leave the house at a certain time and leave the office at a certain time. In winter, this just so happens to coincide with the amount of sunlight we get. It means that many of us are in the unfortunate situation of going to work in the dark and leaving work in the dark, as the hours of sunlight shrink to 8.30am-4.30pm. It is a horrible feeling that is only tolerable because we have a weekend that allows us to experience sunlight during office hours at least twice a week. In the gran scheme of things, this is a pathetic amount of time, and it is quite sad to realise just how much of our time is spent inside a building, and how half of our lives are spent going to and from our homes in the dark. As the coronavirus shuts down offices, it is a good reminder that we rarely get to feel the sunshine during office hours, and a reminder of the toll on our bodies to spend so much of our lives commuting to and from work in the dark.

The Coronavirus, Best Laid Plans and Amateur YouTubers

There are many times in life when life turns down your best laid plans, your best intentions, your best wishes. The coronavirus has presented one of those times, and it forces us all to examine those plans. Do we recover by being the same person we were before, or do we emerge a different person. Do we change our plans? None of my plans have played out as I intended and the crisis threatens to erode them completely, but what if that’s the point? When all the doors you wanted have been slammed in your place, what doors are left opened? For years, I have wanted to make a website to store my life’s work and to create and to write and I did none of it. I always thought that it needed to be polished, to be in the right format, but when TV shows and personalities like The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and Late Night with Seth Meyers are reduced to looking like amateur YouTubers, I realised that the perfectionist in me had stopped me all these years. This website, the work on here and these words represent my best laid plans being dashed, and in its wake, I actually got to doing what I wanted.