I’m kind of scared of life post coronavirus

Like many people around the world, I’m totally anxious and if I’m being honest, quite scared. But I think I’m really scared about what comes next.

Dear Diary,

I’m scared that when this passes, which it will, I’m scared about us squandering our glaring opportunity to reshape and be reshaped, to redirect and be redirected, by this experience.

I’m scared that in our haste to ‘get back to normal’, we won’t really reflect and analyze, and as a result, we will miss the chance to:

all live our lives a little consumptive, less dependent on extravagant and/or constant expenditures. I am confident that our lives will go on without us consuming just for the sake of consuming or just out of habit.

spend more time with our loved ones, talking, reading, laughing, playing making love, rather than rushing around from activity to activity, having only fleeting and surface-level conversations while we work out carpool logistics and office gossip.

utilize way more of our productive manufacturing capacity to efficiently create things we need, i.e. life-saving technologies, rather than just making plastic and disposable bullshit that we don’t need.

Use our tax money to support small businesses, kick-ass health care infrastructure, effective social programs, and our vulnerable citizens rather than spending it on mega-corporate subsidies and war-mongering tools

our willingness to really listen to global experts on topics that most of us honestly don’t know shit about (and they do) and our global efforts to act as a collective to follow their advice. Our willingness to (mostly) abandon fake news and conspiracy theory bullshit for facts and evidence is refreshing right now.

miss our chance to remember that we are thinking individuals and our minds feel healthy when engaged in constant learning and creative activities

hold onto our concern for the elderly, vulnerable, disenfranchised and at-risk members of our communities.

remember that we are all humans and that despite our cultural differences, we share the same root fears and share many of the same dreams; to be healthy, play, work, create, love, travel, and share. I’m worried that our momentary, same facing unity will give way to further xenophobia, prejudice, judgement, travel restrictions, paranoia, and a further social distancing between ‘us and them’. I’m worried we will miss our chance to move towards unity and instead fall further into parochialism.

to really trust that a major economic slowdown will not spell the end of the world, just a possible reset and a rejigging of the status quo capitalist system.

be prepared for the incoming ‘costs’ of the interconnectedness of the world. Global capitalism, globalization, cheap travel, transnational manufacturing, nearly eight billion people and some parts of the world, well, we’ve had all the benefits pretty much for free for fifty years. Shared disease may be the first of our payments but it won’t be the last. The growing wealth gap will have costs. The climate crisis will come to take its share too.

Share crucial life and death global information (and physical and human resources if need be) at breakneck speed regardless of our political leanings, current disagreements or past conflicts.

Recognize that surveillance capitalism[1] firms, whose plan may be to increase monitoring and tracking in order to ‘ensure our future safety’ at all costs, do not ‘have to’ exploit pandemics (and the post-pandemic aftermath) as the only means to reach this end. Major collective investments into global public health will be just as effective and can with the right safeguards, continue to offer rights, privacy and dignity to humanity. Full stop.

I’m scared that another world will present itself as not only possible but probable

many of the habits will have been formed

the benefits will be presented, displayed as positive outcomes (if we choose to see them that way)

and many of the theoretical and logistical impediments to a lifestyle shift involuntarily removed from our way

but that our

ever-shortening
meme watching
twitter arguing
right-swiping
phone checking
rapid scrolling
clickbait clicking attention spans will say….

“Nah. I can’t wait for things to return to normal. Let's get this ship back to business as usual”.

Thinking beyond my own personal and emotionally triggered momentary fears, I think this is what I am mostly scared of.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/04/shoshana-zuboff-surveillance-capitalism-assault-human-automomy-digital-privacy