Life After the Coronavirus

Imagine it’s the week before Christmas, 2020. The coronavirus pandemic is now a distant memory, and you and your family are sitting around a dining room table somewhere in the world, talking about how you each got through the year of the coronavirus. What’s the same, what’s now different. What’s changed, really?

Perhaps a few of your friends and relatives succumbed to this terrible disease, while others of you made it through with only a mild case of fever, sore throat, dry coughing, and deep exhaustion. Many of you have much less retirement income and smaller savings and stock portfolios, and you’ve had to cut back on Christmas presents as some family members are still paying back the debts they incurred while unemployed. And those in your circles without medical aid of some kind went bankrupt due to the medical costs of keeping a loved one alive in the intensive care unit on a ventilator.

You are all, however, very grateful to be alive, and to be together again, for the first time in several months, and to be able to hug each other again, like in the good old days of 2019. You made it!

Some of your family members and friends have been following the economists and financial pundits, who kept on talking throughout 2020 about “returning to normal”. For some of your circle, “normal” had been pretty good. Despite the periodic stock market crashes of a booming capitalist system in the several decades since the second world war, their capital had seen phenomenal growth, and they were able to live off the income from their portfolios and various income streams, buying ever-larger houses and cars and traveling extensively around the world with their surplus cash. Life had never been so good, for anyone, ever!

For others who had not managed to accumulate much capital, however, life was very different. For them it was a constant struggle to find well-paid jobs, being laid off regularly, starting up businesses that failed, unexpected ill-health, accidents and other kinds of suffering. Yet they had kept on trying, because, what else could they do? Some of them had become very disillusioned by “capitalism”, and their children, most of whom were working zero-hours gig-economy contracts with no benefits at all, were totally disillusioned with the “system”. Some had left to live in communes and eco-villages. And some had experienced serious mental health issues and various forms of addiction, especially the more vulnerable, moving in and out of various institutions, and sometimes, onto the streets.

So, what was the new “normal” like? It all depended. On where you lived. On how you lived. On who you were. And most of all, on how you thought and talked, whom you talked with, and what you did as a result. How we use language is key to how we think (or not), and if one can change the way people think, little will remain the same. The challenge is that words do not always mean what we think they mean.

For example, George Orwell, author of the famous work on totalitarianism and Big Brother, “1984”, coined the phrase “Doublespeak”. Doublespeak is why we live in a post-truth world. Words like “free”, “patriot”, “market”, “enterprise”, “innovation”, “growth”, “sustainable”, “green”, “business”, “investment”, “jobs” and “trade” have become distorted, often meaningless sound bites, thrown into a news system that employs facsimile talking heads who have little understanding of what any of this really means, the end goal being primarily to increase ratings and ‘celebrity’ bank balances.

This means we can easily become confused. Is all growth bad? Is growth in renewable energy, social innovation and green businesses bad or good, for example? Are free markets actually free? Or are they rigged to benefit the biggest suppliers and corporations? Is globalization always bad? Surely multiplying viewpoints, registering a greater number of varieties, taking into account a larger number of beings, cultures, phenomena, organisms, and people is better than focusing on narrow ethnic or local interests alone?

In some parts of the world, for example, governments attached incentives to their bailouts of various industries that encouraged investment in renewable energies, electric vehicles, greener ships, circular supply chains, and regenerative agricultural practices. This new green deal approach to reviving those economies also ensured that sufficient funds went to small and medium-sized businesses that invested in retraining their workforces, while zero-hours contracts had to change to provide healthcare and unemployment benefits to workers in the gig economy with a liveable minimum wage.

Sadly, in other parts of the world, authoritarian leaders rewarded their rich friends with bailouts that went mainly to already-wealthy shareholders and executives in the firms that hired the ablest lobbyists. The poor and middle classes were condemned to a hand to mouth existence, with a doubling of the already sizeable homeless population. Environmental degradation increased wherever this happened.

This was a continuation of the old thinking- the story of the first Renaissance and the last 500 years, the story of modernization. Science and technology liberated us from religious dogma and conflicts to see a bigger world beyond the myths and stories of the agricultural age. The arrow of time of increasing complexity in consciousness, culture, human capabilities, and systems pointed in the direction of extracting more energy and matter from the earth and converting it into “better” human experiences and information. The challenge was that we had not yet redefined “the good” and “the good life” in a way fit for the 21st century where the world was bursting apart at its seams. The myth of the rising tide of economic growth that was rumored to lift all boats, the so-called “trickle-down” lie of economics, was revealed as “trickle-up”, yielding unto modern little Caesars the tributes of the poor and middle-classes.

Luckily, during the time of the coronavirus, several good things happened that proved irreversible:

• the number of people taking cruises on heavily polluting cruise ships dropped dramatically and permanently, along with a rapid decline in the sale of giant SUV’s and one-person mega-trucks, with major boosts in greener public transport and mass rapid transit systems;
• the halving of the oil price and coal price led to the permanent closure of uneconomic fracking and oil exploration, while most large coal projects were shelved forever, leading to substantial reductions in carbon emissions;
• the sudden reduction in pollution in the air and water around the world’s major cities inspired their residents to demand measures that maintained cleaner and greener city management policies, also giving an impetus to carbon-neutral transport and manufacturing initiatives;
• smart investors who had taken a hit in the world’s stock markets realized that their only source of long term security was to put their wealth into greener investments which had proven to yield superior returns with less volatility over longer periods of time;
• people everywhere had time to appreciate what “the good life” really meant, shorn of their consumerist and workaholic busyness during quarantine, and really appreciating just how wonderful it was to be able to enjoy nature in all her glory outdoors while spending quality time with their friends and loved ones;
• thanks to ongoing social distancing rules, you could actually hear what the person across the table from you was saying in restaurants, pubs and coffee bars, and shopping crowds became a thing of the past;
• while in quarantine a substantial number of people developed new skills, from reflective practices such as meditation and mindfulness to brushing up on their languages and artistic expression. This led to many approaching life more thoughtfully and consciously, learning to slow down and appreciate the full glory of the moment whenever possible;
• more sustainable and regenerative products and services enjoyed a boom as younger consumers found new ways to make the impact they care about, becoming conscious consumers and constructive activists. This was helped by an explosion of apps and online educational material that enabled them to directly explore the links between their own behavior and the immediate benefits to the environment and social causes;
• many enlightened governments and businesses discovered that investing in psychological and cultural development expanded the horizons of their citizens and employees from narrow ego-centric and ethnocentric concerns, to become more worldcentric and open to learning and new experiences. Liberating human potential to help people self-actualize turned out to have considerable benefits making their lives and work more meaningful, and improving the quality of their lives and work, leading to enhanced levels of wellbeing, less illness and addictions, and much better mental health. This made them better citizens, and even better stakeholders contributing creatively to the development and prosperity of their organizations and communities.

Now, in many parts of the world, when people asked what “returning to normal” meant, one could provide a message of Christmas cheer. The focus of policymakers and business leaders had shifted from “returning to normal functioning” to “moving forward to enhanced functioning”. In practice that meant implementing more effective policies and strategies to give teeth to decarbonization and green new deal approaches that ensured their societies and businesses were on track to meet the legitimate needs of all for housing, water, food, healthcare and work.

Our relatives and friends who had become a little too much like the character Scrooge in Dickens’ Christmas Carol, had slowly transformed into benefactors of millions of Tiny Tims, without the need for a violent and destabilizing “revolution” that many had thought inevitable. It was just better. more conscious, regenerative business. Mind you, there was still some way to go, so you will need to wait until the next installment of this 21st century Christmas Carol celebrating life after the coronavirus to find out more. Cheers, and enjoy your synthetic turkey!