What If the Coronavirus Helped Us?

Finding the silver lining in a global pandemic

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

I punched the first draft of this article into my iPhone Notes App on March 17, 2020 — while out on what would become the first of many self-isolating walks over the following weeks. But instead of hitting publish, I wavered. It seemed too soon to suggest that the COVID-19 crisis could bring anything other than death and destruction to humanity. Nearly a month into the global shutdown, however, a different narrative is emerging — one that suggests that perhaps the demise of society as we know it (er, knew it) is a good thing.

Although the world initially met the coronavirus with mass fear and panic, rogue voices of hope are starting to cut through the noise. The human race has survived pandemics and economic disasters before. We will come out of this eventually. Hopefully, for the better.

I am by no means minimizing the severity of this tragedy, but I also don’t want to add more to our collective sadness and grief.

Instead, I’m here to pose some uncomfortable questions to help cultivate a different long-term vision of our post-COVID-19 world. I hope you get some of the answers you’ve been looking for.

What would happen if we started asking, “what if?”