Since we've all started isolating, I've had the privilege to talk to dozens of people about their situation and how they're responding to COVID. While I cannot possibly list everything I've learned here, I wanted to try and summarize some interesting thoughts in a series of posts, of which this one will be the last.
5 - The End of Everything
One thing that we've sure seen a lot of since the pandemic started is wanna-be oracles claiming the end of just about everything we care about. One thing that's been repeated over and over by doom and gloom pseudo-prophets is the end of dense urban living. The latest of which is crackpot-in-chief James Altucher claiming that "New York is Dead Forever" and the ensuing response from Seinfeld claiming that NYC will bounce back.
Without going into the argument between the two and argue about who might be right, as it really does not matter, I see it more of an indication that in times like these, humans have a tendency to want to exaggerate things when extraordinary, unpredictable events occur. While Altucher is a master troll and his headline proved once again that sensationalist clickbait works at gaining attention if nothing else, no definitive statement can be made about the future, precisely because it is so uncertain.
While things have changed dramatically in the last 6 months, most of the changes we've experienced are just the acceleration of already-existing trends, as if life was put on fast forward for a while.
People predicted that nobody would ever fly again post 9/11, the same way people claimed that things will never be the same every time there is a recession. Granted, this is not to take away from the gravity of the pandemic and the impact it's had on people, but our life before the pandemic will eventually become a distant memory as we grieve the loss of it and move on to rebuild new routines.
The truth is that it's not "the end of everything as we know it" but instead, just faster changes than we're accustomed to. It will be good is some cases and bad in others but on the whole, I think we will come out of this just fine, like every other crisis before and so as long as we are not threatened with extinction, which doesn't seem to be the case this time. Fingers crossed.
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