FOG OF FEAR leads to MORE FOG
Saturday, May 15, 2021
Mumbling inside my head …
I’m hopeful those aspirational experts are prognosticating accurately about economic recovery – but I’m fearful too that loss of life in the 3rd world will far exceed expectations, for which all humanity will pay a massive price. And I fear travel won’t be safe again as soon as everyone wishes. And work is changing; so many changes. Some are temporary, some are permanent, and some are ‘far too soon to tell … .’
When we began our collective ‘COVID-19 pandemic nightmare/horror movie/political morality play’, nobody knew what would happen next.
That was scary.
It still is, and the scary parts or not just virus variants.
And, though this last year was also a time of considerable opportunity for those who seized them, it was hard for most of us to confidently leap through that fog of fear, uncertainty and doubt, to take bold steps.
Finally, after our fear-year, we should relax, but first, we need everyone to please VAX!
But, there is more …
Beyond our health concerns, we (I’m speaking for everyone) have been wondering about the impact on our way of life, how we make our living, the industries we are part of or connected to regarding what would be different, and how things would ‘return to normal.’
But of course, by now, most of us have changed some attitudes or are miss-remembering what normal ever looked like, and we struggle to define what we want ‘normal’ to look like in the future.
I don’t particularly enjoy wearing a mask in busy or crowded public places, but I’m thinking we should have been doing this all along – we might have fewer colds, fewer cases of flu, fewer …
Most guru-types have their advice moments – as I attended virtual conferences and webinars, I observed the mantra of ‘tough winter, strong 2nd half of 2021’ echoed widely. Are they right, or crossing their fingers under the table while smiling confidently on those Zoom calls and webinars.
As news coverage of the Colonial Pipeline hacking/ransomware attack has its ripple effect unfold, one has to wonder ‘what’s next?’ Anyone whose computer got hacked or whose hard drive crashed (I had one of those) will attest – it’s like having root canals, hip replacement, by-pass surgery and a car wreck simultaneously.
Newshounds are focused on how much ransom was paid, which Russians did it, whether it’s tied to the SolarWinds scandal. Non-newshounds everywhere are asking questions about their systems, whether they are hacker-proof or not? Sophisticated organizations have back-ups on everything and redundant hardware, but do they have the capacity to re-start when a disaster or significant hacking happens?
Welcome to the future – it looks like this, and nobody knows with any certainty what will happen next.
When a fog clears, we usually see clearly.
I wonder if rather than defining our new normal, what is happening is that people are designing their new normal – not accepting the way things are, but redefining how things will be. It’s not a generational thing, social media thing, nor individual choice v. society/government policies and trends.
If the rapid change we’ve been through in the last year is to be learned from, it is that massive numbers of people can change how they live, work, are governed and make market-moving decisions almost overnight. Technology is our enabler.
Right now – climate change, global warming and cryptocurrencies are the flavours of the week. They’ll be bumped from the headlines soon, replaced by middle-east conflicts, Russian hackers, and tabloids dissecting the latest gossip about billionaire divorces …
Change of thinking can happen on a mass basis, but as we’ve learned too painfully, material things and expensive machines aren’t altered/re-made with the flip of a switch – whether you are trying to stop a pipeline system or trying to re-start one. Our world is complex and interconnected in ways most of us cannot comprehend.
It’s getting foggy again …