LIVING.BRAND — The absurdity of COVID-19
Press || on Living
Stopping the unstoppable
It’s been a little more than 10 weeks since we welcomed the new year and the new decade with euphoria. Most of it seems gone now and it feels like humanity is left with disillusion.
The global pandemic COVID-19 is the last addition in a chain of severe happenings as we are approaching the end of Q1. Not only did we get close to WW3 or losing Australia to a wildfire, now we are facing the biggest threat to human life in decades. A month ago life was normal — now it came to an abrupt stop.
We pressed || on living!
What would have sounded insane in 2019 has become a reality. Country by country, governments are shutting down public life and only keep essential parts like grocery stores, pharmacies or specific sorts of transportation open. Humanity decelerated from full speed to a minimum within weeks or even days. However, we are still alive and slowly start to realize that stopping the unstoppable might actually be a scenario.
Economically speaking, this will be a disaster. We already face tremendous financial losses and might look back at this crisis in a few years from now as one of the biggest commercial free falls in the history of mankind.
Besides that, however, most of the people on this planet are still breathing and our globe continues to spin. We tapped into an unknown area without knowing what will happen and eventually this might be what we needed in order to wake up. I am not a fan of crises and I don’t know at this point what will happen or how my family or I will get through this, but I can sense a positive takeaway already. Aside from all the negative news and horror stories about rising mortality rates or overcrowded hospitals, there are uplifting events that hint towards possible hopes after the pandemic is over.
Looking back at the final years of the 2010s, one of the main if not the main story was climate change and the need for immediate action. Greta Thunberg rose to become the face of this movement while starting to ask the unpleasant questions that others didn’t want to ask and politicians didn’t want to hear. She always reminded the world about the timely pressure and foreseeable outcomes if the course wouldn’t be changed right away. Now, we have that change — at least the potential start of it.
Reports show that air pollution and CO2 levels are drastically decreasing as a result of the global pause. There are also news about the water in Venice being clear all of a sudden or satellite images that show skies over China without smog [1] — surprisingly pleasant side results of the pandemic that have been wished for by so many protestors over the last months (without a deadly virus of course).
I am by no means trying to talk up the current situation, but in some way it seems like a coincidence and maybe some sort of Karma payback that we as humans needed an invisible enemy to make us stop and rethink our position. Somehow I feel like I am in a huge build-measure-learn cycle with extremely long phases and primarily outside factors that trigger the iteration rather than an evaluation of data points from experiments.
COVID-19 makes us stop, but not the world. COVID-19 presses the pause button for us and it directly shows us the degree of our (interrupted) impact in front of our own eyes. Our hands are tied as we cannot return to a normal life before the pandemic is under control and have no other choice but watching how nature, and we as humans, adapt to the current status.
From a “living / housing” perspective, people are bound to their own home like they haven’t been in multiple decades and maybe ever. The forced quarantine puts them in a closed environment, which sounds scary at first, but way less when thinking about it a couple of times. While mother nature takes in deep breaths outside and shows us how fast she is able to start healing processes, we ourselves can take in deep breaths inside and use this time for reflection, growth and new directions.
This is a chance! There probably won’t be another period in the lifetime of most people alive today in which humans collectively are freed from social interactions such as club nights, dinners, drinks, coffee dates and other time killers. Don’t get me wrong, I am a huge fan of all of those activities, but I also know that time is valuable. We should appreciate the moment right now and use it for all the things we wanted to do four ourselves and others that we never found time for. Let’s use this time to work on ourselves and come out of this crisis stronger than before.
Besides nature’s sit-down and our personal development opportunities, governments can also strive to leapfrog different developments that might take years to implement in the normal world and can be executed quickly in times like these. The current quarantine creates an ideal breeding ground to test concepts such as Universal Basic Income (UBI), digital schools and universities, comprehensive home-offices, or even basic healthcare in countries such as the US. These developments are not a task for individual countries, but for the world as a collective. COVID-19 creates unprecedented scenarios for all of humanity in times when nationalistic movements and populism are on a constant rise. What we need right now is a united world that supports each other and understands the magnitude of the pandemic as a chance to grow closer not separate. If handled successfully, the current crisis could become the catalyst for a new upswing in understanding that we as humans can only develop further if we collaborate.
Only crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change — Milton Friedman
In a few years from now, we will look back at this historic period and each of us will have a different take on the potentials that were offered to us. As we can do the most to help fight COVID-19 by staying in, let's make sure we are making the best of this opportunity.
Life won’t be the same and so shouldn’t we be, but improved for good.
People tend to show their true faces in times of crises or under pressure. I want to see some smiles!
Please check out our website www.livingbrand.ninja or our IG channel @livingbrand.ninja where we will post all of our content and would love to start discussions about the way we should and will live!
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