The Context S04E20 Becoming a Grandfather

A month ago, I became a grandfather. I am very happy! This is the start of what I would call the completion of my genetic duty. Congratulations to Jacopo and Sara, and welcome Emily!

The role of grandparents plays an important foundation in human society. It frees up the parents either for a precious few hours or for a more extended amount of time to procure food or to just be a little bit farther away from the wonderful but screaming and always pretending bundle of joy that their child represents.

The network of connections is represented by the older generation and is something that we must leverage even further than we are today. Those societies that relegate their elderly miss a lot of opportunities of taking advantage of plenty of energy that they have to invest in the well-being of these networks of relationships, and they miss out on being able to have a dialogue about their experiences, about their outlook, about how they see the present and the future that the society is building.

The societies, on the other hand, that keep their elders closer, in my experience are stronger, they are more resilient, they can withstand pretty large changes and challenges.

What does this have to do with blockchain? The uninterrupted chain of life that we are part of that lasted for billions of years, literally never having been interrupted, and that is always renewing itself through the recombination of our genetic material while always finding solutions to the challenges that a changing environment puts on both individuals and the species themselves as they evolve… This is like the Blockchain: it is unbroken and unbreakable in the sense that we are so strongly interested in making sure that it keeps going. Like you can lose a private key to a wallet and then a particular repository of bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies get lost, similarly, certain branches of this genetic chain can become fallow, individuals and species can stop without any offspring, and species can become extinct. The genetic chain is pseudonymous similarly to how blockchain is we can have all kinds of relationships that are assumed to represent what we understand reality to be, but so many novels and so many movies start from the fact that when you look at the genetic basis, it turns out there is a distance between reality and what you understood.

Do you find this analogy useful?