The New Year
Covid, New Year’s ·
This year was supposed to promise a turn away from 2020. I spent two weeks off over the holidays and I had hoped to put 2020 in the rear-view mirror. But that hasn’t happened. 2021 feels like a crap extension of last year.
I have no idea how I’m doing, to be honest. I think that I will be taking the year to recover. 2020 was eye-opening, especially for an old privileged white guy like me. Not that bad stuff can’t happen to me; more that badness was so close to the surface. I’ve had the privilege of ignoring what under-represented folks were shouting from the rooftops, until it couldn’t be ignored anymore.
In the US, we saw on Wednesday a highly-organized group of fascists try to overturn democracy. They were very close to something much worse. These traitors have to be found (all of them, including the enablers and financiers) and punished to the fullest extent. Otherwise it will continue to happen.
Closer to home in Ontario, our pandemic response continues to be atrocious. Dougie Ford has no plan, and people are dying. We are heading into a long winter with no plan to either stop the spread of the virus, or to get the vaccine distributed quickly.
When these types of events open your eyes, it asks the question as to whether there isn’t something more important that I should be doing. My employer has a pretty grand mission, and I do believe that it’s important. I just see a lot of people leaving the company right now. Maybe they know something that I don’t. Adam Waselnuk has a good year-in-review post which includes some of his reasons for leaving Shopify. It was eye-opening. I need to get re-engaged with the work, because there are big problems in the world and I’d like to be part of the solution.