What a Difference a Year Makes
A famous quote from Vladimir Lenin states that “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” To deny that our world has fundamentally changed in the last few weeks and months is to deny reality. The nature of life is change and to resist this, to want things to go back to normal or remain the same, is like trying to design and control the uncontrollable. Our lives have been changed by the events of 2020 and now it is up to each of us to determine how we wish to move forward.
What we have experienced in 2020 has not been seen since wartime, or even ever, including the loss of freedom to relax and share joy with others in restaurants, bars, and coffee shops; to gather in large groups at events such as concerts, movies, and religious ceremonies; to play team sports or work out in fitness centers; or to travel as we wish to visit others, including those in other countries.
So much is changing and so quickly
While protecting people from the spread of COVID-19, we have experienced an incredible fast progression toward online living including online shopping, online working, online schooling, online finance, and just about “online everything.”
At the basic level, COVID-19 has impacted people’s health, whether severely for those infected with the virus or those experiencing intense mental distress, or more moderately, for those whose health has declined due to the lack of social interaction, lack of fresh air and sunshine, lack of healthy food, delayed healthcare, and overall increased stress.
At the next level, COVID-19 has impacted people’s economic situation, whether severely for those who have lost their jobs or more moderately for those who saw their finances strained due to cutbacks. Of course, there were some who benefited from the COVID-19 lockdowns and the shift to online activities. As a result, the divide between the haves and have nots has widened in recent months and will continue to widen in 2021.
It is the next level that most concerns me—the lasting impact that COVID-19 and subsequent viruses will have on our social lives. With each lockdown, our social lives suffer. We lose touch with friends and miss the joy of spontaneously running into old friends. We retreat into our own cocoons, living an amputated life without the basic social connections which signal our humanity. As we move more and more to living our lives online, we become part human/part digital, no longer able to live fully in the natural world, no longer able to live without our ties to technology.
When we do venture out into the world, we are met by faceless strangers whose masks cover up the expression of their very essence and create a barrier between truly connecting on a human level. The loss of social connection intensifies. The loss of freedom intensifies. Hopelessness intensifies.
Some think all will return to the old, familiar normal once a vaccine is administered in 2021. Others warn us that the current vaccine might not be effective against new strains of the virus and the cycle of masks, lockdowns, and social isolation will begin again. No one knows what the future holds.
We are at an existential crossroads
Dictionary.com chose existential as the word of the year for 2019. Many people were already asking the fundamental questions about their lives and their very existence even before COVID-19 was discovered and the dramatic changes of 2020 were experienced.
We are now at an existential crossroads, where we have three choices:
We can retreat back the way we came, hoping that if we choose this path, miraculously we can recreate our life as it was in 2019. This is an illusion because even if we try to stay the same, everyone and everything else around us has changed. In my book, Prisoners of Our Thoughts, I share a saying, “if you want things to stay the same, then something is going to have to change!”1 This saying suggests that the sooner we accept change as a basic fact of life, that is, that nothing in life ever really stands still, the more resilient and less stressed we will be.
We can remain in our state of hopelessness, taking the path that leads us deeper into our existential vacuums, deeper into the feeling that we have lost control over our lives, deeper into our despair and depression.
Or we can choose the path that leads us to create a new way of living and find new meaning for ourselves.
Choose your own “Great Reset”
It is no longer just the health aspects or economic fallout from the virus that should concern us. It is now about our choices, specifically how we choose to live in the new world. It is time to rethink our core beliefs about who we are as well as who we are destined to be in this new world.
If we choose to accept the challenge to retain our humanity in the face of all that lies ahead of us in 2021, each of us will need a Great Reset for our own lives. This would entail at least three things:
Choosing an outlet for your creativity. No matter if you are employed, retired, on financial assistance, or are waiting for the arrival of Universal Basic Income, everyone needs an outlet to express their creativity which is basic to and a source of meaning for all human beings. Your creative talents were given to you to share so find ways to leverage these talents and contribute to the new society that is forming.
Choosing an optimistic attitude. Shift your focus of attention to more positive things. Understand and accept what you can change and what you can not.
Choosing to improve your social connections. Extra effort will be required to keep in touch with your humanity and to keep developing your social skills. Find meaning in balancing the warmth of genuine face to face human connections to offset the coldness of some of your digital interactions. With every change, something persists and something new comes into being. Let our humanity be the part that persists.
As our world spins faster and faster, we must prepare ourselves by knowing what is truly meaningful to us and use this understanding as an anchor in the approaching storm.