Negotiating a Change of Course.

The persistence of the Covid issue is beginning to get me down. It isn’t an issue in isolation to me, of course. In my case it’s just another brick in the wall. But it has me thinking about the extent to which we all rely on there being a certain level of predictability and routine in life. We walk the steady Road of Normality and don’t even notice we’re doing it until we’re suddenly confronted by an impediment. And then it becomes a misty, rickety track with the sky darkened and so many familiar features in the landscape disturbingly absent.

And how are we responding to the change mentally? Mostly it seems, by assuming that the whole thing is temporary, a bad dream out of which we will awaken soon. And then the beloved road of normality we’ve grown used to will appear again and everything will be fine. 

Meanwhile, the rickety track on which we’re currently walking weaves a mazy course and has many offshoots. The government changes the signposts on an almost daily basis, telling us: ‘You must do this now. You mustn’t do that at the moment. You must go this way if you live here; you must go that way if you live there.’ But all the time the underlying message keeps on repeating: It will all be over eventually and then we can go back to living the way we used to live before any of this started.

Well, maybe we will. Maybe a failsafe vaccine will come along, the mist will clear, the old road will still be there to welcome us, and soon we’ll forget that the pandemic ever happened. But suppose we don’t, which I think more likely.  

You might at this juncture point to the fact that pandemics have been an occasional feature of life on earth throughout known history – most of them far more devastating in terms of lives lost – and nothing changed very much after they’d moved on. I know, but life was very different then. Money was a luxury reserved for the chosen few; now it’s the very wheels on which modern society runs. The value and supply of money are at the core of the world’s economies, and economic stability is the immutable foundation of the current road of normality. And let’s not forget that money doesn’t actually exist. It’s just an abstract mechanism based on trust and consensus. 

So what happens if there’s a breakdown in the value and supply of money and we have to build a new road? How long will it take to do that? Will it be better or worse than the old one? And what trials will we have to face in the process of getting there?

Sorry to be a gloom merchant at a time when gloom is already in the ascendant. I’m simply letting off steam because I feel concerned about how today’s younger generations will cope with the rigours of a possible radical change in direction.