The Roaring Twenties

Here at the tail end of the pandemic, many economists are forecasting a "Roaring Twenties" scenario playing out where the economy reopens and roars after everything was closed during the pandemic. Especially with the weather cooperating and the U.S. just crossing the one-year anniversary since Covid started, it is definitely starting to look that way, with retaurants being packed with patrons and peopel being ecouraged to come outside once again. It's times like these where we realize how many people there are in the world: I often have to remind myself how many people is a million people. I can imagine a thousand people fitting into one room, with all of their various eccentricities, ethnicities, genders, etc., but for a million people I have to imagine those 1000 people as a unit, and then imagine 1000 more of those units. That's a million people. And the U.S. (just by documented population, the actual figure is probably more than) 330 of those millions. Luckily, we are now also vaccinating 3-4 million per day for Covid, so those 330 million people will largely be vaccinated. 

I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to live through the Roaring Twenties (or as my friend calls it, "what a time to be alive.") The history of the world has so many time where I didn't want to be alive due to diseases, lack of air conditing, transportation, etc., but the Roaring Twenties does indeed sound like an optimistic time, with no inventions like automobiles, film, radio, etc., and lack of warfare. The problem I see in today's world is that it seems like we aleady have everything, and new inventions and ways of living just seem like excesses, shortcuts to doing something that's already been streamlined to the necessary amount. Then again, I'm sure the people in the 1910's thought that life was just fine already: delivery by snail mail, horse and buggy, calling people by telephone (were telephones even around?), so maybe we are still missing something that will give us great pleasure and convenience that we haven't even thought of before. My point is just that there seems to be diminishing returns to our innovations now: the jump from horses to automobiles was a big one, but will the jump from cars to self-driving vehicles be as big of a jump? That would require something revolutionary like teleportation, which I don't think we will create in my lifetime. Same with artificial intelligence: we got the computer and devices that can store the entirety of the human knowledge in the palm of one's hand, but can we upload it into people's minds in my lifetime? That seems less impossible, especially since I plan on living until I'm 100, especially with the medical innovations available today. 

Also, there can be new artistic innovations. MJ likes to school me on things like art deco, which developed in the 1920's and produced such exquisite works as the Chrysler Building and New York skyscrapers, so there's definitely more room for new and exciting art. What will be the new exciting world places to live during the Roaring Twenties that future civilizations will be jealous of and yearn for a time machine to travel back to, like 1890's Paris or 1920's New York? It might still be the same big cities, but maybe some emerging places like Austin, Texas, Seattle, Washington, or San Francisco? Silicon Valley of the 1990's or 2000's would be a great place to time travel back to and examine everything that happened in the tech world, where events that changed the world exponentially occurred in single home garages or fraternatiy houses (Facebook). Heck, the best innovations of the next decade or generation could have been created in someone's home office during the 2020 pandemic. I alway regret that I was born a little too late to have a cognizant understanding of what was going on in the 1990's, and used my newly-bought Compuserve computer in 1997 to just play video games and write 5th grade essays. Then again, maybe I was born at just the right time to fully experience the new 21st century Roaring Twenties. Life is all about timing, and maybe we've gone through the pandemic just to set up for the biggest time of our life (or it can be a gigantic disappointment of relapse into another pandemic, stock market bubble burst, political polarization leading to warfare and trife, who knows). Whatever the case, what a time to be alive. 

Fantasize on, 

Robert Yan