When Normal Is No Longer Enough
COVID-19 is a global pandemic, unlike any other that we can recall in recent history. Months after the first cases were reported in China, the virus has swept the globe and ground our social lives and business to a halt. Physical distancing and quarantine have become necessary for large numbers of the global population. Once thriving, global cities are now ghost towns. In NYC, usually overcrowded streets are now empty. Sirens, the unofficial street anthem of NYC, are now a signal to anxious residents carrying a more ominous meaning. Hospitals struggle to manage overcrowded conditions as the flood of infected continues to rise. Millions of people find themselves existing under conditions they couldn’t have imagined a mere few weeks ago. Many are unemployed or, at best, face a precarious professional reality. We are now physically sheltered, and the future is uncertain. Amidst such dislocation, it is natural to long for a “return to normal.” But if we dive deeper it becomes painfully evident that normal is a complicated concept. Was our normal desirable? The reality is that for a significant number of us, the recent normal was terrible. In light of COVID-19 we have an opportunity to catalyze this moment to potentially imagine and actualize an alternative. We deserve a near future that transcends our previous standards of normal. We are too accustom to accepting a normal that serves the few at the expense of the many. Whatever world emerges at the end of the current COVID-19 reality, it’s clear that normal is no longer enough.
Cracks Become Fissures
We must actively resist a return to normal. When we use the term normal often, what we mean is a return to the status quo. For some, the status quo is a sense of security that makes us comfortable while also distancing us from our privilege. The status quo operates as a set of rules and norms, some formal some informal, that help us negotiate the world. In talks I have shared globally over the years, I pointed to an increasing lack of trust in institutions, rising suicide rates, loneliness as a mental health issue, and growing wealth inequality as signals of deep-rooted problems in our society. Now amid a global pandemic, the inability of our so-called leaders and governments to offer solutions is galling. The ineffectual nature of our current response is wholly inadequate against the sprawling reach of the health crisis. As I have been saying in conversations with loved ones, friends, and clients, “cracks become fissures.” We must come to terms with decades of policy that chose to center the worse instincts of late-stage capitalism, promote extraction values and elevate weaponized selfishness. Our VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) reality demands new thinking and new action, or we will continue to fall short in this particular moment, but future shocks will find us similarly unprepared. While this sounds dire, and it certainly is, there still remains the possibility of doing better. We do not have to romanticize an undetermined future to respond to the moment at hand. If there was ever a time to reject the yearning for normal and upholding the toxic status quo, this is it.
Impossible Is Nothing
Crafting a new story is an urgent call to action. Culture is essential to how we structure our stories. I define culture as the shared world of ideas and values that connect us and are manifested through people, places, formal and informal networks. Culture is no different than the languages we speak and the air we breathe. Culture surrounds us. Culture is how we make sense of the world. Our existing story centers ownership as personified by industrial age values. Industrial age values persist despite their toxic nature. Upholding an ownership/industrial age story only serves to degrade our shared experience. Stewardship, which is the shared responsibility of a society to oversee, protect, and pass on its critical resources over the course of generations, is a far more useful operating system. We need a story that is based on stewardship. Now it is easy to dismiss storytelling as passive when it appears our current moment demands action. I offer that stories are active agents in the choices we make as a society. We have been acting on and amplifying a story that has long exploited people and the planet. We can drive action in the same manner with a stewardship narrative that is just as potent and concrete. The notion of what is possible versus impossible is about the stories we invest in. I am reminded of a quote from Muhammad Ali that was used in an old Adidas advertisement. The consumerism of sneakers aside, it is incredibly relevant, “Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given, than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”
Once we concede that our ability to change the world is, in part, dependent on the stories, we believe we start to crack the code on laying out potential new paths. Before COVID-19 advocating for social programs and building a functioning social safety net were considered impossible. The financial costs were simply too high, and the common refrain was how would we pay for it all. The COVID-19 crisis has blown the lid off what is possible and proves it is not about the money. Our investment in a functioning society was never about what we can afford as much as it was about supporting one narrative versus another.
Embrace Magic
“Magic is the name we give to the friction between vision and reality” — Ajaz Ahmed & Stefan Olander
“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” — W.B. Yeats
When I talk about magic, I don’t mean in a supernatural sense. I think about magic, as exemplified in these quotes. We can envision where we want to go. We have to postulate and wonder and experiment if we hope to move from one place to another. We need the friction of a new state and alternative narrative. This environment needs stories, imagination, and yes, a heavy dose of magic.
Feel Deeply
The so-called gig economy has been a compelling narrative that normalizes our current relationship to work as primarily freelance and distributed workers. In unison with “hustle culture,” it reinforces and manages to exalt the idea that we are all self-actualizing units of production tirelessly working and producing “something.” If we work longer, become more focused, build our brands, then success and all of its trappings are within our grasp. A COVID-19 reality that has many of us now working from home as intensified these ideas. Endless memes and social media posts implore all of us to use this time wisely to create the next epic thing. As the logic goes, lack of time was your only excuse, so in light of the global pandemic, we have been gifted with endless amounts of time. You only need to focus. We should reject the temptation for performative productivity. Hustle culture and its acolytes were always bullshit. Pushing the hustle narrative in a time of crisis just doubles down on the senseless scramble for status. Yes, some of us will create and flourish. In times like this, we expressly turn to artist and creative’s to get us through dark moments. But it is just as likely some of us will flounder, become sick ourselves and potentially mourn loved ones and friends. We need to give ourselves space and permission to feel deeply in these moments. Positivity in the form of production does not create room for the totality of our emotions. Feelings of confusion, anguish, and anxiety are valid, acceptable, and rational when facing this new challenge. It is okay to process what this means without also shouldering the burden of productivity as a measurement of your self-worth and diligence.
Future Fetish
Strategists and Futurists are in a full-blown predictive mode as they try to determine what is going to happen whenever we leave our homes. It is a natural response to look forward, but I also think it is just as valid to say, “I don’t know.” “I don’t know” is as realistic a prediction because quite simply, we are very much wrestling with the present. We don’t know what the world will look like post-COVID-19. That presumes a reality that doesn’t include recurring outbreaks of the virus and/or other pandemic threats. The future will depend on the choices we make in the present and how and to whom we allocate resources. Of course, advocating new stories is part of an examination of the future, but it does not attempt to predict it. Instead, I am offering we need to choose what values we think are essential and then craft narratives that support those stories. The “Future of Work” is an ideal testing ground. Most of the conversations have focused on various tools designed to make us efficient. The explosion of conference calls via Zoom, Google Live, and other devices are representative of efficiency as a function of future fetish.
In contrast, I have thought that the future of work should be centered on labor movements and creating an environment that protects labor rights. Amid COVID-19, worker rights via a fair living wage, worker safety, and freedom to organize are front and center. Who has been designated “essential” is evidence enough we need to rethink who and what is required to make the world we inhabit function. As businesses shut down, we need to reimagine our systems of accounts payable/receivables. Instead of romanticizing the gig economy and hustling, we need to ensure that we break the reality of freelance serfdom, which forces creative’s to endure long payment schedules. Any future worth having must center people and our labor, ensuring dignity, safety, and timely compensation.
Vigilance/Resilience
During a crisis, there will be those who seek to take advantage of the cracks in the system. Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine explains how disaster capitalism activates to take advantage of breakdowns and crises to profit. In service to a new story, we must remain vigilant against those who would ramp up the propensity to exploit. It is naive to assume supporters of extraction values won’t fight tooth and nail to protect a status quo that furthers their own self-interest. It is imperative we organize, learn from, and support one another in our attempts to build something new. Vigilance must be combined with resilience, as any potential future requires a long-term commitment to working through possible salves to complex systems.
Language Matters
I began the year with an essay discussing the importance of language and culture in making sense of the world. I wrote in part, “Culture is complex, and it is certainly not linear. Looking back, 2016 was a year of incredible social turmoil. The results of the U.S. presidential election, coupled with Brexit, signaled a global seismic shift in perceived norms. Today, the fallout from those events is everywhere.
At that time, I asserted that language, in meaning and use, would take center stage and would be vital to our understanding of how the world was developing. In 2020, the premise underlying the importance of language has not changed. If anything, it is more intense. We create and shape our reality through our shared understanding of language. Language, in turn, shapes our culture, which is how we express our shared values. If 2020 is to have a prevailing theme, it will be how we use our vast resources to truly understand the world around us.”
I hone in on three terms: joy, compassion, and justice in comparison to happiness, empathy, and purpose. I argue the former is more dynamic and offers a more powerful way to make sense of our lived conditions. These words provide more context, complexity, and richness relative to how we interact with the world and each other. This is essential in forming and supporting new stories. Joy is more than “happiness” or “being positive.” We are capable of great joy, even in moments of struggle and pain. Joy doesn’t numb us to the status quo; it helps us to confront it. Joy allows us to feel the entirety of our experiences while at the same time, giving us the agency and permission to create something new. Compassion shifts our values into action and imbues them with meaning. Justice must be at the core of how we think about the world we want to live in. It is the foundational piece on which everything else is built. Words have meaning, and the choices we make to describe our condition are gravely important.
Resist Cynicism
The growing ranks of cynics will argue that regardless of the terms we use that it doesn’t matter. In the end, they are “just words,” and words don’t have weight. Remember the sticks and stones adage of our youth? Cynicism erodes magic and imagination and supports the status quo. Powerful institutions prefer us to be cynical and believe we cannot effect change. Our belief in the nature of power reflects how we see ourselves in the world. Any perception of being powerless enables the status quo to remain unchallenged. Can language be diminished and co-opted? Of course, it can. Love has been used to sell greeting cards and breakfast cereal. More recently, purpose has been used in branding to obscure organizational malfeasance and greenwash rather than confront the climate crisis. Despite that reality, it does not erode the powerful meaning inherent in either love or purpose. These ideas hold meaning precisely because they give us hope in a better future. Cynicism might feel like common sense given our environment, but it is anything but. It is actually easy because it says the things we feel don’t matter. Resisting cynicism is the difference between surviving and thriving.
Today Is Everyday
I am reluctant to think of our recent COVID-19 as a necessary reset. I do not take solace in physical separation from loved ones, friends, and colleagues. What happens next is up to all of us collectively, and I suspect the fallout will take quite a while to sift through. Do we regress toward “normal” and cling to a broken status quo, or do we lean into new magic and sharpen our senses to pick up the possible? No matter where you fall on that spectrum each day, we make choices to reinforce one reality versus another. Let’s work on crafting the values of stewardship into all we do. Let’s be gentle with each other and ourselves.
“But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.” — Max Ehrmann, Desiderata
