Today I attended the second sizable live event in the last 3 weeks. The first one was a marathon, this one was a conference. It was a crypto related conference, one of the many that are taking place these days in Lisbon. The total audience was in the hundreds, but I guess, in total, at least one thousand people were around the venue.

I’m not going to write about the conference per se, but mostly about how it felt to be part of a normal crowd of people after almost two years.

It felt damn good.

I mean, there were some protocols to be followed, you should have been either recently tested, or vaccinated, to attend. But once the protocols were enabled, and everybody proved what they chose to prove, everything was back to (almost) normal. The only difference was that the venue staff had to wear masks.

People were mingling, talking, presenting, listening, laughing, asking questions, cheering, it was a whirlwind of emotions and energies that were freely floating around.

We are designed to live like this. Not isolated. Not distanced. Not polarized. Human connection, even as simple as a conference (which for many may have seemed boring or difficult) is one of our best tools for survival. We’re social animals and if you take the social dimension out of our lives, there’s not much left, really.

I left a bit early, because I had prior commitments, but I left energized. If there’s something that I want to be related to this day, when I’m going to look back at the 365 writing challenge, is that today was about live events.

And their magic.