Many people are picking up strong new habits during Covid *despite* themselves, many involving significant skills. My own breakfast burritos are now so good, I doubt I'll be eating them out again unless it's really special. I'm now a customer at tortilla level of supply chain.

Especially because when you master a skill, suddenly you have control over customization. I'm transitioning significantly to Just Egg, so I can make the burritos with that, as well as egg or egg white or tofu. The intersection of beats me/customizes like me is vanishingly small.

This bottom-up skills transformation is why I believe there will be many permanent shifts post-covid, big and small, creating a bottom-up new normal. I'm normally a big cynic about radical transformations based on new "values" or visionary exhortations to "build back better"

When the masses pick up a new layer of skills, everything above that on the stack gets unstable. In our household, we've done so many things we never did before, that are now permanent skills. And our instrumentation has evolved to match. Like, we own a pulse oximeter now.

A good precedent for understanding this stuff is military history. Military strategy and doctrine change fairly rarely -- and it is nearly always in the wake of ground-level changes in skills and technology use, leading to new tactical evolutions. Trickle up radical change.

This takes time. Took 30 years after the evolution of cannons and decline of close-in ramming/melees for navies to realize that ships should form a sideways line against the enemy line, not a forward-facing line.

Took militaries 20 years after the development of robust, battlefield-capable automobiles to realize vehicles should not move at the speed of marching infantry, but infantry should be mechanized to move at the speed of vehicles. Result = blitzkrieg.

I read this rule of thumb somewhere, but it takes about 3 weeks to acquire a serious habit involving both a routine and perhaps a modicum of skill. But once installed, if you enjoy it and it's functional, it stays. We've been doing many new things for way longer than 3 weeks.

Think of every new habit you've acquired a small, illegible lived value. Now all the habits acquired by 330 million people (for the US.. different elsewhere) and form a giant set intersection. Now sort those habits by the number of people who've acquired it. That's your canvas.

If you're a social revolutionary, politician, or CEO, thinking about building back better, and are doing it in the usual way by roping in some thought-leadership/vision/manifesto writing talent to produce a top-down prescription for the "better" you're not even wrong.

The good news is: it's not going to be all posturing and signaling and no real change and back to the same old same old in a few years.

The bad news is: the canvas already has a big messy painting on it. You're not going to get to craft a vision YOU want for the recovery.

If you're serious about going beyond lip service re: the recovery, and parleying it into serious change, your first task is not predicting the future, envisioning scenarios, or compiling your radical change agenda for shock-doctrine implementation. Your first task is mapping.

Until you have a good sense of the base layer of newly acquired habits, and newly lost habits has __already shifted__ and how much and in what ways it will shift you're not ready to shape its further evolution.

And note that habits are being lost as well, due to lack of reinforcement. Like, going out to eat rather than getting take out feels strange. That might be semi-permanent for me. Might not be going out as much. Just as I stopped writing paper letters once I got on email.

But it's not ALL bottom-up. Many people make that mistake when there is a groundswell of Big Bottom-Up Energy going on changing the canvas. Bottom-up tends to run out of steam at the level of larger patterns.

Left to itself, for example, if "make your own breakfast burritos" is one of the big shifts, will not bootstrap into a new supply chain for burritos. It will take higher level more deliberate actions like an entrepreneur recognizing it and (for eg) starting a meal-kit business.

Stewart Brand pace layering idea is good here. The bottom layer has shifted. With different time constants everything above it will shift. Some shifts won't be complete for a decade or two.

Some big second-level things already happening. Secular shift towards WFH for example, is a key enabler for locking in many of the new habits. https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1296130746130653185

Others have acquired weird new optionality and time constants. I now own hair clippers, and wife has mastered giving me a decent enough haircut that even if I go back to hair salons, it may be less frequent, and the option will last at least as long as the clippers.

And don't underestimate the factor that many people are having 3 simultaneous realizations:

1. There IS an alternative to X
2. They can master the skill for X
3. They actually like alt to X better

Preferences are shifting, not just habits.

This particular effect has the psychological quality of dozens of small red pill/enlightenment moments in every lifestyle. It's not a single big false consciousness/learned helplessness pattern breaking down. It's a lot of little ones acting together.

It's not scales falling from your eyes in one big Aha! moment where you jump up and yell "the premium mediocre lifestyle emperor has no clothes." It's more like lots of little nudges and shifts together knocking you into a new lifestyle equilibrium that is radically different.

My buddy @keithmadams once called this "the unreasonable effectiveness of small optimizations" and that's what we're all doing right now. I wrote a newsletter about that idea several years ago. It's a very powerful idea https://breakingsmart.substack.com/p/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of

The biggest (and frankly, most exciting) aspect of this is that there is a secular "grain" to a LOT of the habit shifts that is already evident: away from consumer culture, and towards diy/maker/hacker/prosumer/producer culture. Also reuse, repair, repurpose, etc.

This is not being driven by sustainability and climate activists, or driven by concern for the the toxicity of consumer culture or the moral superiority of a stronger diy type culture. It's being driven by necessity, will stay out of preference, but will have a bigger effect.

The thing about all this diy stuff is that it shifts preferences at a hugely important meta-level: time vs. money and the quality of life equation.

When people discover that their time-money tradeoff curve has more elasticity than they thought, because new skills make the time-cost of things much lower, and supply chain vagaries make the time+money cost higher, preference for more money over more time shifts significantly.

This is the home edition of the build-vs-buy decision-making that all businesses are very familiar with. It is the consumerization of build-vs-buy decisions. For most people, for most kinds of domestic consumption, build-vs-buy decisions were not even available. You had to buy.

So all the business process skills that businesses learned in the last 40 years -- outsourcing vs. insourcing, build vs. buy etc. and unwittingly taught a lot of their employees, are now being applied at scale in homes.

All these are kinda good from the pov of a lot of values/mission-driven perspectives (climate, sustainability, retreat from financial productivity/yield as the driving legible metric of the economy), but it is important to note that it doesn't actually "belong" to any mission.

So a key mistake you will be tempted to make is to interpret the shift through just one values lens. Do that and you'll be disappointed. Maybe 70% of the shift will align with climate action, but 30% won't and you'll be tempted to knee-jerk fight that or eliminate it as noise.

The changes are at what I call the log level, and are a shift in phenomenology of lifestyle variety at population scale. Supervening narratives will necessarily reductive. The idea of supervenience is good to get comfortable with for thinking this through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervenience

People's habits are changing --> their identities are changing --> how they fit into any story you craft will change