Whoosh. In what felt like an instant, the exponential growth of a virus sucked all the oxygen out of the whole world. When the oxygen comes back, months from now, what do we want our new world to look like? This is our thinking time.
A fine mist
But first, we’ve got to survive the coming months. Months with so many atomised lives. One moment, you’re here, reaching into the future and pulling hard to drag yourself towards your dreams. The next minute, you’ve exploded into a mist of tiny droplets. Your plans have vaporised. You’re floating in the air, barely visible, wondering what happens next.
The pandemic has frozen everything in its path. This is the reality for so many.
We should disable gravity, so lives and dreams can float in the air, rather than be dashed on the rocks below. Disable gravity until the thaw. We should temporarily de-tension all kinds of financial obligations that we have to one another. Rent, mortgages, utilities bills, service fees. Wherever we can de-tension the system, we have an opportunity for people to hope and plan for life months from now. De-tune from the old world, to be in tune with this strange new world.
Conversely, in other cases, we should keep money flowing. Panic buy ticket vouchers for post-pandemic shows at our favourite venues. Continue paying for services that we may temporarily be unable to use, if we can afford it. Be hungry in the tax contribution we ask of people who are still connected to secure work, and generous in the amount of support that we give to those who need it.
Let the different layers of our obligations slide over one another for a while. Six months ago, it was honourable to be steadfast and single minded, Now, we must be flexible. We must be willing to let things slip. It will all settle into a new, stable configuration if we give it a chance.
Testing
If we’re to play at holding our breath until we reach the end of the tunnel, how long will this bloody tunnel be? We’re subconsciously hanging out for the endgame, which is a vaccine, eighteen months away.
But I think we could breathe sooner. A profound shift could happen when cheap, simple testing becomes widely available. Perhaps that could happen within months.
Testing lets us see in the dark.
Once we know who is sick ahead of time, we can relax blanket lockdowns. We quarantine the right people, and give care to the right people, instead of sinking hospitals below towering waves of hypochondria. Right now, we can’t see anything, and it’s so important that we don’t miss somebody who is sick, so we have to lock down everyone and everything. When we can see, we can be more discerning about our interventions, and that will make a world of difference.
So we’re not hanging on until the virus dies. We’re hanging on until we can work with it, like we work with every other untameable force in nature. Many forces exist that we cannot control, but that we can understand and conform to. Infectious diseases are like the wind and the waves and the raging rivers in that regard.
We’re hanging out until we can amass the resources to allow us to sail through it: the medical staff, the hospital beds, the drugs, the ventilators and ECMO machines that will usher the vast majority of people safely to the other side of this crisis.
What happens to us during this waiting time?
Resonance
For forever, people have lost their jobs and lost their livelihoods. For forever, people have lost their good health and lost their vitality. Mostly, this happens to people in isolation. People suffer alone. A pixel goes dark here or there and nobody notices. There’s no-one to talk it over with.
Now, a whole lot of people are in trouble together.
I don’t know which is better or worse. The answer lies in philosophy and ethics, but I don’t know what it is.
But we have an uncommon resonance right now. So many people feeling the same thing. Not everyone is in immediate hardship, but everyone around the globe is feeling it, deep and hard. This kind of unified understanding; this grounding in shared experience is something we have not seen for some time. It’s brand new to whole generations. Many within society have led hard lives, but have struggled to have their voices heard. Now they have a chance for their stories to resonate.
There is a chance for us to see each other with fresh eyes, and to formulate new ways of relating to each other based on the new things that we see.
Tough times ahead notwithstanding, there is justification for optimism about a new beginning. A new connection to struggle, from which many of us have become detached, and the possibility of discovering a crystalline new structure.
Stable configurations
Nature produces stable, efficient shapes. Maybe something gets heated, and then cools into a new low-energy structure. Something strong and supple. This will happen to society. This is called annealing. A generation’s world view will be shaped by these forces, as surely as the great depression, world wars, or most recently decade upon decade of abundance have shaped generations.
I’m not advocating a particular model. I don’t know what will happen, or what the best outcome is. I don’t think anybody who is honest would claim to see utopia. All I see is that we’re at a point of inflection: after this point, things will be different to before. Instead of rushing headlong to a particular pre-imagined model (for example, the model of the world as it is now), trying to force our lives into some figment of our fevered imaginations, we should introspect. We should try to find our true values. We should try to find out what connects us to the world around us. We should hold tight to that, and compare the newly emerging world to those values, and let it cool into a new shape which honours them.
The postcov world will be brand new to us. It could be amazing.