It’s been a couple of months since the world was forced indoors by the threat of COVID-19. The business sector, education, and public life has largely ground to a crawl– with little else to do unless you’re lucky enough to be able to work from home.
To try and combat the ever-present sense of ennui, people the world over have expressed some strange new ways of coping with the pandemic. From do-it-yourself hairdressing to countless hours spent between baking bread and small-scale pottery, it’s clear to see that boredom and relative social isolation is driving people to invest in new skills.
While it’s easy to shrug this development off as people engaging in hobbies for their own amusement, the conditions appear to be empowering people with a set of transferable skills for life in the new normal. What opportunities will this open for 2020’s restless energy?
Boredom is as boredom does
Now, the idea of finding transferable skills in one’s hobby is by no means new, but given the state of the economy at the moment, there’s more of an incentive for attempting to monetize. When you’re seeing large-scale lay-offs and a lack of government support, it’s easy to want to supplement that with any form of income.
Once the economy stabilizes, and people are able to return to work in earnest, the opportunity for a separate income stream remains (that is, if you don’t switch tracks entirely). Imagine being able to use that to your advantage as soon as things pick up! Funny enough, if this all sounds familiar, it’s because these are all parts of a tried-and-tested financial practice called diversification.
But why now? To which, the obvious response is why not? People tend to fear failure for the most part, and largely prefer the stability of a regular wage. A case however, could be made that there is no better time to bite the bullet. The pandemic era is a bit of a lull, and affords considerably more time to develop secondary skill sets on top of what you mainly do for a living.
The more skills you develop, the more headroom you give yourself for possible ventures. By keeping these streams separate, you allow yourself to earn without suffering as much in case one pursuit fails financially. Quarantine is a bummer, but we’re getting out of this stronger– let it show!
