As we try to imagine our lives after COVID-19, it’s all too easy to become caught up in an unexamined rush to return to normalcy. Let’s not go back to normalcy. Present-tense normalcy is a world in which we are facing stunning climate change that will make this shutdown look like a fun vacation. Normalcy today is also a global rise in racism, fascist kleptocracies, destructive corporate greed, willful disdain for societal responsibility and wholesale attempts to fully destroy even the most minimal support for the poor, sick, oppressed, and common people of every age and gender. We shouldn’t race back to a normalcy where we tsk and sigh at school shootings, racist violence, and rampant homelessness, because “that’s just how things are today.”
To be clear, it would be disingenuous to pretend there might be a silver lining to the deaths of those we have lost and will lose still. It would be irresponsible, however, not to recognize how many of us now have time on our hands. There are so many of us that we have the ability to form something akin to a society-focused think tank from our vast aggregate knowledge and skills. We can solve a range of problems we’ve allowed to degrade too much of our existence as we go through our “normal,” lives.
Many millions of us are now at home. We are suddenly collectively equipped with billions of daily hours of time that we have never had before and will never have again. To put this in perspective, it required 13 billion human-hours to get to the Moon – using mostly slide rules. Each of us has thousands of times the computing power of NASA in the 60s! We're spending this time and power sorting through Netflix watchlists when we could be banding together to solve every problem in the world. Solving problems does not mean writing letters to politicians “asking” them to vote on something. It doesn’t mean updating Facebook or posting pictures to show how great your lunch looks. It doesn’t mean working on your novel. Every one of us can do something societally useful by intentionally seeking out projects which can succeed by applying the human intelligence of hundreds, or thousands. What can we achieve if we actively work together?
Let’s start now. Take an hour: Identify an actual problem and then post it here so that you and other interested people can connect and focus your enormous collective brainpower. Come back later and recommend the ideas that you would like to help work to solve. Maybe you’d like to take the initiative and collect the likes to facilitate a team to begin the process.
Don't disregard the possibility that you may have something in your head either not thought of, or that was not acted upon previously. Perhaps you don’t feel you have the right background. It doesn’t matter. If your brain works, you can help. You can still be a part of the great human societal computer. We’re all in this together.
If what develops becomes the core of a useful business, build it to be cooperative - to benefit all participants. Ensure that the guiding principle of that business is that it honorably and collaboratively employs people to solve problems and improve people’s lives. Make THAT kind of business development the new normal.
This horrible disease has shut us away, but in forcing us physically apart has presented to us an opportunity for group action like never before, and we owe it to ourselves not to waste it. Let’s apply this enormous gift of time to solve the problems we – and every living thing on this Earth – are facing. Let’s use this unprecedented opportunity to recalibrate normal.
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