Humans of Davos — Episode 5
This is the fifth episode of the Humans of Davos diary. Check out https://medium.com/humans-of-davos for more.
I got a Bachelor’s degree in FOMO — Fear Of Missing Out — in San Francisco, a summer internship at Burning Man, and graduated with a doctorate at the WEF’s Annual Meeting. Nowhere is the social anxiety stronger than in Davos.
I rose out of bed at 7am, after four short hours of sleep, woken up by my roommate Fedir who had an early meeting with a Ukrainian oligarch. I couldn’t snooze him. I skipped breakfast, rushed to the shuttle and made it to the Convention Center barely on time for the session with Ms. Fore, the Executive Director of UNICEF.
While I couldn’t yet string two sentences together, Adam, a Global Shaper and CEO of Conscious Steps, had already sent an op-ed to an Australian newspaper, removed his shoes, and prepared two questions for Ms. Fore. It took me a while to get used to seeing him in socks. “How uncomfortable must his shoes be?” I wondered. I understood later it was a marketing strategy — he ran a social enterprise that sold socks as a revenue mechanism for charities.
Adam had a rare skill. He always found ways to ask the most provoking questions without ever being impolite. To the UNICEF Director, who just said 10 million jobs were needed per day to cope with global demand, he responded: “I want a future where my children don’t have to work.” I wanted that skill.
Before the end of the session, I was already checking what the next item on my agenda was. I was triple booked, and had to choose between a session on GDP, the digital divide or innovation in Europe. I thought it would be a good idea to ask the Shapers where they were going, but it just gave me two more options to choose from. It was barely 10am and I already felt tired. “Remember your priorities Hicham.” I told myself. ShelterTech: I was here to raise money and awareness for the homeless community of San Francisco. The rest was secondary.
It was peculiar to hear the moderator of the session on digital divide introduce “Mr. Dell”. I never thought of the brand as being a family name. The debate touched upon all sorts of inequalities, but not one mention was made of homelessness. For once, I allowed myself to ask a comment — to which the panelists responded with sympathy, but little commitment. At the end of the session, I chased Mr. Dell to pitch what we did, and almost begged the Washington Post moderator for coverage on the issue. I got business cards which said “thanks for playing”.
By noon, I was too hungry to function and went to the Community Lounge to regroup and eat a dry brie sandwich. The menu never changed. On the way, I bumped into Khaloud, who worked for the Saudi Government and started an entertainment company. She and other Shapers were posing for a picture in front of a WEF logo. It felt good to see a familiar face. She was the only woman I knew from Saudi Arabia, and reminded me of a fashionable Mad Max hero. “I can even drive!” she quipped. Her belt said “Off-White” in large letters. “That’s the identity I should’ve chosen in the US.” I joked to myself. I had so many stereotypes and prejudices about life there for a woman that I was afraid of even thinking about them. “Is it common for Saudi women to shake a man’s hand outside the country?” I asked clumsily. She stared at me through her golden glasses, pulled out a laser gun and vaporised me. “Women shake men’s hands even in Saudi,” she answered, visibly annoyed. She gave me a hug. I had made a fool of myself.
As I was chewing my sandwich, I noticed people were discreetly looking at something behind me. I turned around and my blood froze. I had been trying to meet Mrs. Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund and former French Minister of the Economy, since the moment I knew she was at Davos, emailing her and her staff. I took my role of proxy for my communities very seriously: I had asked friends, colleagues and acquaintances what message they wanted me to bring to Davos, and the one that came back very often was “We should move beyond GDP as a performance indicator, and transition to a system where consumption decreases” — aka degrowth. She was the best person to comment on that.
I turned around and fumbled a prepared question about degrowth that I couldn’t find in my notebook, trying not to sputter at the head of the IMF. “No,” she replied, “we need growth. GDP should be combined with other indicators but we need growth to create jobs.” There was nothing revolutionary in her response. “At least she’s heard about degrowth one additional time,” I convinced myself.
My alarm went off. I was late for the next session. As I cleared my table and picked up my bag, I could hear tango music playing in my head — a fast Libertango. I had been living on adrenaline, water and dry sandwiches for the past four days and I was reaching my limits. The two dancers spun faster and faster, ever closer to each other while the background around them became blurry.
Marc Benioff was standing in a queue waiting to get into a session. A few feet behind him was Marissa Meyer, Yahoo’s former CEO. I wasn’t going to be able to talk to both. “Hi Marc,” I said, “we met in San Francisco a few months ago.” “You could be making this up, it would be the same to me,” his face seemed to say. It was the business equivalent of the “Have we met before?” pickup line. “Thank you for supporting Prop C.” I said. “It will help build affordable housing for the vulnerable communities of San Francisco.”
I was having a hard time putting homelessness on the Davos agenda. The more the day went by, the more choices I had to make between the 5,000 sessions, the more I wondered if I was making the right ones. I was so aware of my privilege to be here, that I couldn’t possibly go back to San Francisco to tell our Community Representatives that “Davos was a great personal experience.”
By 5pm, choked by the pressure and stress, I had been to five sessions on technology or income inequality and failed to see how any of that was going to be useful for people on the streets of SF. I had also decided against hundreds of parallel sessions and had super FOMO. I chased journalists, reporters and writers asking them if they’d be interested in talking about homelessness. “Give me a card and I’ll follow up,” they said. “I don’t care,” I heard.
I sat on a bench to breath a little and made the mistake of checking my phone. I had 132 unread messages in the Global Shapers chat group. They jumped out of the phone before I could turn it off and started dancing around my head. Adam had a selfie with Matt Damon, who was holding pairs of his socks. The video WEF had just made about his access to water program already had 100,000 views. Gabriela was interviewed by Reuters about the situation in Venezuela. I was obviously doing something wrong.
Wadia, the WEF person responsible for the 7,000 Global Shapers worldwide and youth advocate, rushed in the corridor and stopped to ask me how I was doing. He was Moroccan, from Rabat, and his smile never failed to make me feel at home. Married to a Swiss woman, he had mystical children with blond but kinky hair. “I’m ok” I said — which translates to “Help!” in Morocco. He gave me the same advice he had already shared with the group, telling me that my $100,000 fundraising goal was not realistic during Davos. “Build relationships,” he repeated.
I gathered the last bits of energy I had to dive into a two hour workshop session on innovation, moderated by the CEO of Time Magazine. I felt dizzy thinking about the networking event, dinner and corporate parties I had planned for the rest of the day, before working on the daily blog post for Humans of Davos. If everything went according to plan, I was going to write that between midnight and 3am.
Rachel, a Shaper working at No More to end domestic violence, stopped me on my way there. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “No, you’re not going to that workshop,” she insisted. We had danced like teenagers the night before, jumping, shaking and hiding our faces, laughing our way across the corporate-sponsored dance floor. The story of her life was that of the breadcrumbs she spread along the random experiences that paved her way, smiling at the birds pecking them: she wasn’t looking for a way back.
Rachel wanted to bring ShelterTech to Seattle and I loved the idea. She sat me on a chair and brought us drinks. “Look,” she said, “it’s Prince William!” with a candor in her eyes that appeased me. She was my FOMO antidote.
I finally finished writing the next episode of Humans of Davos and sent it to Charles, Derek and Vix to review, dreading yet another firestorm of comments. I sat on my bed in the middle of the night, sorting through the business cards I collected — a few reporters interested in a story about ShelterTech, an op-ed about homelessness and a few leads for corporate partnerships. “Tomorrow, I should talk to foundations.” I thought to myself, scrolling down the WEF’s contact list. But tomorrow had already started a few hours ago and I was already double-booked for a morning session and had 70 new unread messages. Serendipity was demonstrating outside my calendar, holding a sign that read “Let us in!”. Tomorrow, or today, was my last day in Davos.
