NYC is Back

The last time I was in NYC was just before Christmas when the Omicron was emerging and there were ( mostly exaggerated) reports of a city freaking out. While I may have disagreed with the extent of the emergency being reported, there was no doubt the city was once again on an uncertain footing, unsure of what business and personal disruptive wave was coming next.

I'm here now for a full day preventative health exam offer by Princeton Longevity Center where they scan, poke, insert, flush, inflate and test really every part of your body from brain to heart to colon to bone mass to whatever else that makes our body ticks. It's a bit of a higher end concierge approach to medicine, which I'm all for. On the 71st floor of One World Trade, the views weren't bad either.

It was a beautiful warm day, and masking mandates were being eliminated and it just really felt that at least for yesterday, the pandemic was coming to an end in terms of day to day disruption. And you could feel the pulse quickening the city. And the thing about an event of this magnitude is that the impact and effect/affect on people's psyche is so repressed and buried because they had to continue on with life, raise kids, go to work, keep their marriage strong, and do a million life things with this incredible life danger stress underlying everything, repressed, stiff upper lip. So the idea we may be emerging, not a false emergence like when we got our vaccines, or wore our masks, but a real finality, that type of deep exhale, teary response could be felt.

I think its hard to overstate the stress that has been threaded through each and every person, young and old, for nearly 2 years. Cancelled plans, missed graduations, families separated - it doesn't matter how much money you made or didn't, if you got sick or you did not - the daunting nature of the challenge was real.

So, with jackets off, restaurants full, a less aggressive masking policy, and a bounce in the step, this big city felt good and alive.

I've probably mentioned this before - I think one of the reasons for the robust economy, the inflation and the low joblessness, is because we all got better at what we do, are more efficient, have less rules that don't make sense - Covid disrupted the status quo like few things ever had, and for people in my professional peer group, the challenges we faced and overcame the last two years have made us better at what we do. Sort of like why athletes train with weights around their ankles - makes the ordinary harder, and when you take the weights off, you are faster than you were before with the same effort. That increased productivity is now baked into the economy, in millions of professionals, and each of their more efficient micro decisions and actions have a little more juice to them, resulting in a macro impact on the economy as a whole.

Bake in the time saved with Zoom, remote/hybrid work and a thousand other workplace changes, and we have just lived through a revolution not unlike the industrial, where there was a true leap forward from the status quo.

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