My approach to what I do in my job — and it might even be the approach to my life — is that everything I do is the most important thing I do. Whether it’s a play or the next film. It is the most important thing. I know it’s not going to be the most important thing, and it might not be close to being the best, but I have to make it the most important thing. That means I will be ambitious with my job and not with my career. That’s a very big difference, because if I’m ambitious with my career, everything I do now is just stepping-stones leading to something — a goal I might never reach, and so everything will be disappointing. But if I make everything important, then eventually it will become a career. Big or small, we don’t know. But at least everything was important.
A theory of change is the opposite of a theory of action — it works backwards from the goal, in concrete steps, to figure out what you can do to achieve it. To develop a theory of change, you need to start at the end and repeatedly ask yourself, “Concretely, how does one achieve that?”
When we use non-spatial social apps, we often understand that another's cognitive presence is there, but we can't feel the more human presence we're wired to need. When we're not social distancing, we fulfill this need elsewhere, outside of software. We meet for coffee. We go on a walk. We play a game, or show a friend something funny on our phone and watch them laugh. We have infinite options at our disposal for relating to others. Though the lack of these same options inside the software we use is sometimes inconvenient, we can usually get over it.
But things are different right now. We're constrained to rely almost exclusively on software for social interaction. What are usually minor inconveniences in our existing applications are now the main factor preventing us from fulfilling our social needs.