Things in the world seem to move so fast. I find myself still trying to process what was happening back in 2019. Back when my second daughter was born and the pandemic kicked off in the first place.
Since then it seems its just been a deluge of occurrences and I haven’t really kept up writing about them here. Much less writing about product management as much of this blog was intended to focus on (say at least half of it.) I still have an idea rattling around in my head that I really need to write about the lessons I learned about product management from working on supporting the Team America Relief organization as its tech team lead. I’m quite sure that at some point I will come back to that and will be able to access some relevant memories and share some lessons I’ve learned from it.
It can seem exhausting to try to keep up with politics or tech news, and the bizarre fact that these have become more and more entangled and fast moving. Like some kind of swirling vortex, whipping faster and faster around a center of mass of…change? I guess.
I’ve been getting less and less value from social media and have uninstalled all of it from my phone. I haven’t even been accessing them on browser on mobile anymore, just from a laptop running a VPN and using Firefox’s containers. I dont think I can fully contain the surveillance software but I can at least make myself a slightly harder target than others, running faster than the other hikers from the bear, as it were.
Listening to audiobooks and podcasts continues to be something I spend a ton of time on. I’m often able to do these – I wonder a little about my retention on these. In fact I wonder about my retention and attention on most things these days, Im wondering if my attention span and ability to focus has really degraded or if its a perception. And if it has degraded how much of it is being a parent and having constant necessary reactivity and juggling and how much of it is learned from the little cues and behaviors and habits summed slowly over time by the digital environment seemingly designed to parcel up and direct our attention in shorter and shorter snippets.
The more I learn about the world (even specifically the info-tech world) the more it seems I dont really understand it. I keep wondering if all business are indeed ultimately going to become advertising businesses (as supposedly Apple is, behind its claim of user privacy.) And if so, who’s buying all that advertising and for what? After all Apple is supposed to be the biggest advertiser on Twitter. Nilay Patel at the verge recently mentioned he thinks most SaaS businesses are ultimately circular, they’re all just buying eachothers’ software. And ultimately he must be right because, of course, an economy IS circular, it a closed system. But my lens, advertising, SaaS startups etc. dont seem to be big enough yet to encompass the whole economy, unless perhaps its a bit fractal?
More to think about here no doubt. This feels like a better place to share these thoughts and musings than any social media I know.
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