When the Pandemic is Finally Through With Us

A recent Seth Godin blog reads as follows:

Is everything going to be

okay?

That depends.

If we mean, “Is everything going

to be the way it was and the way I expected it to be?” then the answer is no.

The answer to that question is always no, it always has been.

If we mean, “Is everything going

to be the way it is going to be?” then the answer is yes. Of course. If we

define whatever happens as okay, then everything will be.

Given that everything is going

to be the way it’s going to be, we’re left with an actually useful and

productive question instead: “What are you going to do about it?”

This kind of insight, in my inbox every day is one of the

reasons I find Seth to have such an interesting take on life. He’s been doing

this every day for more than ten years (link).

Well for sure everything is going to be the way it’s going

to be…

…some of us are going to die. Not

many, as a percentage, but some. Some of us are going to lose our jobs or

businesses and, again, not all that many.

Life goes on, sicknesses heal and, after

these strange times we’re living through at the moment, life will return to

normal.

But it’s going to be a new kind of normal. The old

reliable normal, where only the politics and economic fairness and environment

were fucked up, is over. Want to call it a watershed moment in history?

Well, why not? That’s as good a definition as any.

I choose to see that as an exciting prospect.

I was really getting bored—and actually

somewhat pessimistic—with the direction we had chosen for humanity. I mean,

come on, was Jeff Bezos just going to continue to own more and more of this

poor old planet? I’m sorry, Jeff, but you’re boring.

Were the Democrats and Republicans

going to stay locked up—as they have for forty years—trading off presidencies?

That’s boring. Two generations of boring.

While we were looking the other way, trying to decide

whether Tesla was the future, the planet got bored as well.

You can hardly blame it. After a

few hundred-thousand years of comparative harmlessness, the human race became

suddenly silly, unreliable and hell-bent on wrecking an until-now reasonable

understanding of what we were allowed to fiddle with and what we were not.

When you keep wrecking the

family car, daddy takes away the keys.

So, back to exciting prospects. This coronavirus thing the

planet decided to throw our way is a wake-up call. If we haven’t yet, we’re

about to stumble over to the window, rub the sleep out of our eyes, throw back

the curtains and see what we’ve done.

We will have had a taste of governments

throwing survival-money at the out-of-work, because it was no longer a debate.

It was throw the money or bury the dead. With automation, that’s the direction work

in America is going, so here’s a preview of coming attractions.

Other stuff as well. Working from

home, childcare, online learning, healthcare and probably even the rebirth of

the union movement all got a light shined on them. My guess is the we’re not

going to be willing to go back to life as it was.

Sorry, Jeff, but we got too

close a look at what it means to buy a $168 million home and earn that much in

less than a day.

The super-rich are beginning to understand that.

In our new world, electric will be the power, desalinization

will be the water source, trees will replace industrial agriculture and

populations will fall in direct proportion to education and healthcare. Seas

will rise, populations shift and animals go extinct. Businesses will change

dramatically, because business always responds to needs.

It can—and probably will—be great.

But it will never be like it was.