Coronavirus: Everything is set to change
It’s no real surprise that the eagerly awaited unveiling of the plan to get back to normal turned out to be such a litany of vagueness. This is a government that has always been more comfortable talking about what it doesn’t want to see happen than laying out actual plans.
But behind the obfuscation, the administration is sticking to the same questionable narrative of the lockdown as simply a painful and expensive interim period ahead of an inevitable return to normality. It is as if a giant pause button has been pressed and the only real question is quite when to unpress it and allow the machinery of the economy to begin slowly whirring back into action.
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This ignores the fact that, while many businesses have been stood down, the people who use them or work in them have been far from frozen. Those of us at home may not have been being busy with life since the middle of March, but we’ve been very busy with wondering. This crisis has been like an enormous psychological experiment carried out on everyone all at once.
Amidst the anxiety, we’ve mustered an admirable collegial resilience. Invoking the spirit of bygone wartime, we’ve rallied one another to the cause. We’ve kept telling each other that what we’re doing is needed, that we have no choice, that the sacrifice will all be worth it in the end. Nobody is safe, be they prince or pauper, premier or proletarian. The only way through is if we stick tight and stay the course.
This notion of everyone somehow being in this together belies the reality of how all the entailed sacrifice is actually being shared. Its distribution is highly uneven, and depends on very individual circumstance. How we’ve each experienced this time will profoundly determine not only how we emerge from it as individuals but what the world looks like when we return to it.
We’re steeling ourselves for economic mayhem when the lights go back on. But the more lasting legacy of this crisis won’t be so much its immediate macro-financial consequences, it will be more the extent to which it leaves each of us with recalibrated feelings about the world. We’ll have spent our weeks away reflecting on what really matters and have discovered that some things we used to view as crucial seem now oddly superficial, and some things that we paid little thought to are actually the things that mean most of all.
As individuals take stock of their own experience, some will find themselves reevaluating how they feel about their work, their relationships, their communities, and how and where they live their lives. They’ll reassess their feelings about the way the world operates, and with this perhaps their attitudes to technology, entertainment, leisure, travel, professional sport, business, commerce, and how key institutions like government, schools, healthcare, and banking work. Some will mull the refreshing simplicity of this time away and their views about physicality and public spaces, nature, exercise, and the way eating and drinking plays out in the rituals of their lives. And a few will have landed on a different idea of who does the most essential work and how these people should be recognized and rewarded.
We’ll come back to a world where some stuff has changed, in some instances for the better and in others for the worse. The things that precipitated those changes will become part of the story too. We’ll make note of those who just stood by, those who got in the way, and those who made a positive difference. We’ll remember the ones who behaved well, but we’ll probably remember even more the ones who behaved badly.
COVID-19 isn’t responsible for all this review of outlook, but is rather a catalyst for change that was already underway. From Extinction Rebellion through the broader environmental movement to the proliferation of social enterprise, there was significant energy behind this direction long before this crisis struck. When a majority of corporate CEOs can declare that driving shareholder value is no longer the sole priority for their businesses, and billionaire tech investors talk openly about the insidiousness of income inequality, the times were already a-changing.
The lodestone of the recovery won’t be government switching the big cogs within the economy back on. It will play out deeper within the engine at the individual and group level. Some will emerge from this deeply embittered while others will have undergone something approaching spiritual enlightenment. These experiences will shape how people feel about their lives, and from that they’ll figure out what they think and want to do. The one thing we can be certain about is that it won’t be the same as it all was before. Just trying to press unpause will only succeed in mangling the tape.