What Would Steve Jobs Think About Reaction To Coronavirus?

One of the things about living through a pandemic is that you have a lot more time to do leisurely activity since schools, summer camps, and vacation spots are all closed. Therefore I tried to catch up on some reading. One of the books I read is the biography "Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson. It is a fascinating story about the complex history of Jobs and his eccentric personality. I can relate to much of the book as I remember reading about a lot of it as they happened 30-40 years ago. 

I came across a passage that I thought is so meaningful for our current coronavirus afflicted times. Isaacson describes how Jobs was a firm believer in people meeting each other to talk and exchange ideas. When he designed the headquarters for Pixar, he made sure that the structure would naturally lead people to congregate in a central atrium. He even went so far as to initially design only two bathrooms in the entire building so people would have to gather in one area. Wrote Isaacson, 

Despite being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its isolating potential, Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings. "There's a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat," he said. "That's crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions."

What would Jobs think about the work from home and online education trends in the country? Many companies, especially the high tech industry in Jobs' own Silicon Valley, have told their employees to work remotely. Likewise, teachers are now refusing to resume classes in school and are staging sickouts. While millions of people are still working or have returned to work, teachers feel they are not essential workers and demand to stay home. This despite the fact the parents and students across the country feel online learning is inferior to real classroom involvement. What's worse, college students have to continue paying exorbitant tuition and fees even though classrooms are closed.

As the panic surrounding Covid 19 continues, are we teaching a generation of workers and students that they should run away from adversity, even if they are the generation least likely to get sick from the disease? Are the students being taught to cower in fear of the unknown instead of striving to conquer what ails society by going to school and returning to work? Steve Jobs, one of the great geniuses of the last half century, would probably have scoffed at this remote learning and work trend. As millions of people at hospitals around the country continue to work daily, despite a hospital being a natural aggregator of sick Covid patients, I can't help feeling that this reluctance to return to pre-Covid normalcy will be with us for a very long time.