It's been an unbelievable 6 weeks since I returned to my writing business. There are a lot of things I learned, especially seeing all your responses and comments on my writing, and being able to observe which topics people tend to click. I'm not writing to gain popularity, it's just my journal and thoughts diary that I decided to be public so you could also read and maybe share your thoughts too. Therefore as a form of review I put here the statistic of my previous posts per Wednesday, 8th April 2020.


As a note, due to my 'newspaper-like' blog layout, the data only records the number of people who actually clicked on a post, rather than just open the home page of this blog, since you can actually read a whole post without actually clicking the post link. I am still working to find out a way to resolve this issue, but for experiment purpose I took the raw data from the view count.

My two-part 'Genesis' tops the view count, and I hypothesised that this is due to the topic that closely related to religion and science, which most of my readers quite familiar with this dilemma. The post with the least view is surprisingly the the first part of 'The Concept of God'. I do not know what causes this low-click phenomenon, but I will be back with another part soon. Maybe if you want to share the reason why you didn't read that one, I will be really pleased!

So, this will be my last post for this season (don't worry I'll be back in a couple days with the new season) :


Life After The Crisis


Last time I wrote about how our economic system is no other than the way we manifest our built-in survival instinct. This post will still be related to our current crisis, but in a relatively different point of view. I want to discuss about our behaviour and our interactions among humans during and after the crisis later.

This is not our first pandemic, but I have to say this is the first pandemic that we handled well as humans. I'm not saying that we have done our best; there are still a lot of rooms to improve, but we handled this much better than our previous ones. This is definitely thanks to our better understanding of science and technology, which made us to identify the crisis sooner and also faster to share the news. However, what comes at a cost?

I want you to think about public places. Parks, green spaces, anything that allow random people to walk into and do anything. You sit with your companions under the sunny sky, grilling meat while enjoy bird chirping and kids running around. 5 metres beside you there is another unknown group sitting down and playing music together. You do not know them; they do not know you either, but you are okay with the fact that they are staying in a same area as you. Why? "Because this is a public place," you might say. Yes, but why such public places exist in the first place? The first common answer is because we don't have enough places for each human to do anything that needs large spaces, so we share it. That is totally true, but there is actually a hidden reason why those places could exist : trust.

The Unspoken Trust


We trust each other in general. You feel fine to be in public spaces close to other unknown human, because you know the chance that you are gonna be killed is really really low, and your mind said, "it's okay, other people just want to enjoy their day, same as me." There is still indeed a possibility that you are sitting in a park next to a serial killer, but you don't mind it. We live together in a planet and we might as well share our spaces. 

This trust was built not by a short period of time, we developed this together. We learned to share spaces to reach the same goal. It's been thousand of years and this trust has never been broken, until now.

It is 2020, and you are not allowed to be close with other people who you don't live together with, let alone strangers. When someone else coughs or sneezes, you automatically walk away. When a stranger get closer than 1.5 metres to you, you move to protect your space. In a short moment, we turned from trusting each other to basically being suspicious to everyone. You don't feel safe in public places, your brain automatically thinks that anyone could make you sick.

'What Are You Going To Do After This Crisis Ends?'


This is a question that I read a lot in social media and news surveys. 

vice.com
The problem is, other that we don't know when this crisis ends, is we don't know if this crisis ends. I'm not saying that we will all be extinct or what, what I want to imply is there is no "today is the last day of the crisis." The transition is obviously going to be smooth, it will end gradually. I'll try to explain it better : imagine today the government said, "Okay tomorrow you are allowed to be in public spaces without 1.5m distance from each other. We declare it is already safe to gather more than two people." Will this really happen instantaneously? I do not know.

This could be the first time in the history that we are not allowed to trust other human being. The trust that we built for a long time is broken, and I do now know how will we react to this. Of course over time we will learn to love and trust each other again, because as I elaborated in the last post, we are still social beings after all. The only problem is, how long will it take? 

I am really eager to see the development of our own behaviour. I have some planned some observation to do after the gathering ban lifted and public spaces are reopened: I want to sit in of the busiest metro station in my town I'm currently living in (Hannover), and observe how strangers protect their private space. A short background : Kröpcke (the name of the station) is the busiest subway station in Hannover. It located just under the city centre, with at least 10 subway lines stop regularly. On peak hours, it is normal to wait for the train literally touching with others, and hop on the train like sardines in a can.

During this current crisis, it changes drastically. You can literally count the amount of people there, and regularly there are only maximum 10 people in a coach, which usually could fit 50 people or more, and it is totally understandable. However, will this be the same case directly after the bans are lifted? This is I want to observe; will people wait for the next train, or will they just jump in and touching shoulders as we used to do previously? Will people stand right around the tracks, or will we keep distances? I really encourage you to do the same observation wherever you live, the results could be different. Hit me up if you come up with something!

Last Words


Here we are, on the last episode of my inaugural season as a writer. I want to say thank you to everyone who took their time to read and enjoy my posts, also to all of you who hate them and saying that I wanted to start an underground movement. I would be happy if you want to share and discuss any topic with me, since I would have not been able to come up with everything by myself. 

Stay healthy, stay safe. Enjoy your time at home, start experimenting with something, find a new routines or hobby. See you in a couple days!