#91 The Uncertain Certainty

Hello, friends.

What I’m Learning/Doing

I ran across this excerpt (below) from C.S. Lewis this week. It was written in a time, when after WWII, a lot of people were scared of atomic bombs. Today, we have a lot of people concerned about how the Coronavirus is going to impact our lives. I’m not discounting its seriousness. It is serious. However, I find Lewis’ perspective worth pondering.

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”
In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.
This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

— “On Living in an Atomic Age” (1948)

Whatupdates

Honestly:

LOFT:

  • Focusing on three main audiences right now: SaaS companies, Shopify Companies and Fractional CTOs.

CrewPay:

  • Doing customer discovery targeted at AirBnB/VRBO hosts
  • Exploring potential exit paths

Pttrns:

  • Growing the audience base and planning our redesign.

Until next time.

-David

P.S. I’m giving Tot a try. It’s a simple text note taker focused on minimal convenience: https://tot.rocks/

P.P.S. I’m a sucker for this stuff: https://slightlychoppy.com/

P.P.P.S. Brilliant marketing by “Canada’s internet”, very Canadian stock photography: https://www.cira.ca/stock-images/gallery

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