I originally wrote and posted this article on Medium two weeks after we got locked down due to the spread of Covid. At that time I was living in Ireland with my wife and the future looked very uncertain. Those predictions might look obvious in hindsight but they weren’t back then.
If there is a clear lesson from this Covid-19 crisis is that Western governments are still living in the Stone Age. Saving lives from future epidemics will mean to change our habits.
In the 2000s we pioneered the consumers online experience, in the 2010s we shifted our social interactions online and in the 2020s we’ll manage to merge both.
The fact that the Covid-19 pandemic is already changing human habits is more than evident. Recent crises such as the Dot-com bubble or the Global Financial Crisis brought us a new set of patterns that influenced our day to day lives. The most obvious one is our lack of trust in institutions. This mistrust brought us the gig economy and decentralised technologies which allowed us to even create powerful digital currencies.
But this time is different, people will not have someone to blame. Humans will have to adapt their habits to prevent the spread of new epidemics that could potentially be more deadly than previous ones. Governments will not save us from the next epidemic, they’ve demonstrated that they still live in the Stone Age and that their actions have been useless to stop the virus.
So here are my 5 thoughts on which new habits the market can potentially capitalise on from this crisis:
1. Self-health awareness
It’s been decades since the healthcare industry has shifted their investment from fixing diseases to try and prevent them. This has resulted in learning from genetic predispositions, unknowingly damaging life-style choices or powerful cancer screenings. But the progress that has been achieved by centralising information in pharma companies has unfortunately, been at the expense of reducing the information flow with consumers. After this crisis, it’s quite possible we could feel a need to track our daily health the same way we track our social media updates. Maybe our morning news shifts from scrolling through a friend’s wedding pictures followed by urgent work emails ending with a report stating you have an above average probability on having a stroke.
2. Privacy will be challenged
You can bet governments will react to improve the current public opinion. That means increasing the odds to be reelected and passing short term policies. They’ll invest in more hospitals, better equipment, new drugs and new procedures to prepare for the next epidemic. But they will not use humankind’s most powerful tool, technology. With a little bit of innovation, new technologies will emerge to prevent and detect the next pandemic. Imagine the amount of progress a new independent joint venture from Google and Facebook could have to improve our odds to prevent the next pandemic. Imagine if these companies could read your emails, your instant messages and cross this information with browser searches to prevent the spread of the new pandemic and save thousands of lives. Furthermore, think of the impact of providing smart wearables to instantly track our temperature or blood pressure.
3. From online social content to social experiencing
Some industries already anticipated this major move — Peloton has been leading this change in the fitness world and big players are rapidly integrating these features to their services such as Netflix Party. But this is just the beginning: single player actions will evolve into multi-player ones. From sharing your high-end fashion shoe shopping with your relatives, to deciding and eating your food delivery with your overseas friends. We will see all types of ventures innovating in this area and move from a content world (already saturated) towards an online sharing one.
4. New leisure activities will emerge
It’s obvious that working from home will become more common after this crisis but the implications that will bring to our lives are infinite. People will spend less time commuting, we will be willing to live in the suburbs and overall day to day flexibility will increase. New forms of leisure will emerge and people will be willing to spend their free time and money to keep them occupied. Maybe gaming or virtual worlds will become mainstream, but I do believe other forms of entertainment will emerge in this space.
5. Increase in available commercial real estate
With more people working from home, demand for prime real estate in central areas will decrease. This space will become available for other businesses that historically were not able to afford abusive rent prices for small ventures. We will see new businesses moving, spaces reinvented for new experiences and who knows if the housing crisis will slow down when individuals start buying empty office space for building residential apartments.
The amount of new opportunities are endless. Although it seems that big tech could be the one benefiting from these changes, I believe that new start ups will emerge and take the lead in capitalising on these new habits. I do also hope that Western governments will mimic Asia’s actions to prevent future epidemics and will take the lead with new policies with technology as the central player.