Don’t look inside.

I spent this holiday season, as did many others at GoParity and many people all over the world, in quarantine confinement. For nearly one month all our plans were cancelled, from spending Christmas with the family in Portugal to a small trip with very dear old friends we don’t spend enough time with and live far from. We just stayed home. Again.

I wish I could say I read 5 books in 4 weeks, learned how to cook four new delicious vegan dishes, or learned how to play a new instrument like the cool people I see everyday on social media but, like my co-founder Luís always says, “reality is what it is”.

I can say I spent a lot of time with the family I love and choose to be with every day and I’m grateful for that. I hope you did to 🙏🏿 Needless to say picking up on our movie watch list (both the grownup’s and children’s) was one of our main pastimes.

Out of all the movies we watched, “Don’t look up” (with Leonardo DiCaprio, Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchet among many other recognizable names) was the one that impacted me the most.

The movie metaphorically talks about climate change and how we are dealing with it (and a lot else). Climate change is embodied by a meteor that is up to 9km wide and heading towards the Earth, big enough to destroy all life on it. (There’s no spoiler in case you haven’t watched it).

It’s funny that we often used the expression “If climate change was a dark hole in the sky we’d be doing all we can to avoid it”. Now someone came and put it in a movie.

“The movie is called Don’t look up but really what is telling us is to look inside”

Still this movie is about much more than climate change. It uses the argument of climate change to depict the behaviour of humans on earth and the result is overwhelming. The movie is called don’t look up but really what is telling us is to look inside.

I don’t think it is a superb movie. I don’t think that, according to “normal” standards, anyone can say it is. Yet it was one of the best and most insightful ones for me (even considering I’m very often the kind to think “Don’t come tell ME about climate change”).

So I thought I’d share some of my favourite insights from the movie and what impact it may have on the way we do things at GoParity:

1) The different approach to raising awareness about climate change (and human behaviour). We’ve had dozens of movies and documentaries that are based on scientific data, developed by the world’s most renowned scientists and presented by influential people like David Attenborough, Al Gore or the same Leonardo DiCaprio and they have not produced the needed outcomes.

This time the director (Adam McKay) chose to caricaturize many aspects of modern economy, society, media and politics, such as consumerism, populism, revolving doors, the excessive power of large corporations, misinformation, nepotism, corruption or greed. The result is easily relatable, eye-opening are scaringly realistic.

2) There’s always enough time, until there isn’t. Throughout the movie there is always panic and urgency (much like the climate urgency) among the scientists who have seen what’s coming and there’s always “enough time” for the decision makers who try to combine their own agenda with the coming Armageddon, be it the politician building up for the next elections or the large corporation that wants to make money out of saving the world. Ring a bell? In “Don’t look up” the metaphor is climate change but it could be mostly any other problem we collectively need to address, from the use of natural resources, to the pandemic, health or hunger.

3) We can’t expect different results if we keep doing the same thing. The movie also made me go back to 2014 when in an executive education course in the MIT Sloan in Boston (that I was lucky enough to get a scholarship for) one of the sentences that stayed with me (by Prof. Ralph Katz) was “your reasons for success in the past are often those for failure in the future”. While the scientists want a bold radical plan that puts first things first — saving life on our planet — the decision-makers are more preoccupied in maintaining the “stable” status quo and corporations on making money out of the “opportunity”. Needless to say the results is…

How is this related to GoParity? Well, we’re doing our small bit to fight climate change, we’ve had an amazing 2021, but we are also certain we can achieve a lot more. As I wrote in an email to our investor community earlier this year, in 2022:

“📣 We’ll be more activistic: push for a bigger change, show up and take stances.

📱 We’ll do more and differently: we will launch a new GoParity experience with a new design, new products and an improved version of the existing ones.

🗺️ We’ll be all over the place: we will expand even more beyond the countries where we operate now, on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, but you can also expect to access GoParity on different third-party apps.

🤝🏼 You’ll get to be a shareholder (if you want to): this year we’ll also fundraise to finance our growth and impact. Apart from institutional investors that share our vision and values we want everyone to be able to join. In a recent email, I asked the question and over 95% of the responses were positive. We heard it and we’ll make happen in the first semester of 2022.”

Just like in the movie they tell people not to look up while that’s exactly what they should do, we’ll definitely be looking forward by looking inside first.