The future arrived a little earlier than we thought it would

You’d be a rich person if you could somehow collect a royalty on every use of the phrase “things will never be the same,” or some variant thereof, in relation to the long-term changes wrought by COVID-19.

You’d be considerably less wealthy if you collected only for instances in which that was actually true.

Not that the Great Pandemic of 2020 won’t alter the way we live, although you’ll need to read this column in about 10 years for an assessment of what changes actually stuck.

But what the Great Pandemic will also do is hasten change that was already happening and that would have continued even if there hadn’t been a viral breakout.

Example No. 1, and the subject of today’s lesson: The demise of face-to-face, in-person contact, communication and commerce.

The theme of life during the pandemic has been all about staying as far away from other people as long as possible. We work from home. We do our shopping from home. Our socializing is done via Zoom and Skype. Our kids are now educated (we hope) via the internet. For entertainment we stream video content at home. Medical practitioners encourage us to use telemed programs for all but the most immediate and serious health issues.

It’s a radical departure from where we were just four months ago. It’s not that big a change from where we were going to be in 10 years, virus or not.

Go back and look at that list of activities. There’s not a one for which there wasn’t an existing trend.

Work from home? Telecommuting advocates have been promising work from home was the future, and the wonders of our telecommunication age have made work outside or beyond an office possible. What that’s done is extend the working day to consume our away-from-the-office hours. For the most part, we continue to stuff ourselves into cars, then stuff those cars onto roads headed into the same central employment center.

Work-from-home promised to relieve traffic congestion, free workers from the tyranny of meetings, free up hours lost to commuting, reduce the amount of space companies need to lease for offices.

Commerce from home was much further down the road of becoming the way life is normally lived than work-from-home ever has been. Bricks-and-mortar retailing was in big trouble long before the virus showed up and closed down the stores. It wasn’t that much of a leap for many people to do even more shopping from home—how else did Amazon become the behemoth it is?

Retailing isn’t the only segment of commerce that has been moved out of the physical world. When was the last time you were in a bank branch? Most transactions, even more complicated ones like loan application, can be handled online, by phone, at an ATM or even by the original communications mode, snail mail.

Speaking of which, when was the last time you were in a post office? Email and online services have taken away most of the personal correspondence and business communication. Should you need actual stamps, those can be bought online, too.

Students, parents and teachers have been clamoring for years for some alternative, especially at the higher-ed level, to the learning-by-lecture method that requires everyone to receive instruction at the same time, in the same place, in the same method and at the same pace as everyone else. Online instruction, the theory goes, injects a needed dose of flexibility and customization to individual tastes and abilities into the system.

Similarly, telemedicine, which includes email and video conferencing, allows for more time and attention to individual cases than can be provided by harried, overburdened doctors and nurses in an office setting. That’s the theory anyway, which is why health-care entities had been setting up telemedicine programs long before the virus showed up.

Most of these ventures, however have been of limited scope and scale, meant as trial runs to test the theories, not to immediately and completely replace the way things had been done. Had there been no COVID-19, some of them would have slowly migrated into the mainstream, growing and evolving and becoming accepted and routine parts of daily life (such as online retailing already has).

What COVID-19 did was shrink the timetable for testing and adoption from years to days, and subject those modes of operation to full-on, real-world use, whether they were ready or not.

That’s what we’ll be spending the coming months doing: assessing whether the online, remote, low-personal-contact approaches are up to the job, or need some work before they can carry the burden of what we expect out of them.

Are we more productive, or is the quality of our work better, if we’re at home or at an office? Do students learn more or faster even if they’re not in a classroom? Can health care be effectively managed electronically, or is it a poor substitute for being in the same room as the doc? Do we need physical stores at all?

The answers are likely to be “sometimes,” “it depends,” and “not without some changes.” We are social animals, and there are unquantifiable benefits to even seemingly inefficient ways of operating like commuting to offices. But having tested and experienced some of these new-fangled ways, we’re also going to decide that some, perhaps many, are preferable. A future in which so much of life is lived and business is conducted was going to arrive someday anyway. COVID-19 just assured the future got here a lot faster than originally scheduled.

This story was originally published May 9, 2020 at 11:00 AM.