When Covid-19 hit, there were only four questions that took primary place in the human anxious hours of 3 am in the morning:
Am I going to make it through this?
Do I have enough cash to see me through this?
Is my Family okay and safe?
Do I have enough toilet paper?
This was how we reacted.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs quickly broke itself apart amidst the most harrowing pandemic the modern world had ever seen. And is still experiencing. Households latching their doors from the monster, businesses shutting shop – some for good – leaders looking ugly and relationships showing their hidden cracks. The unravelling of our lives began - and it now has plans to stay.
The first aggravator of this discomfort is that as a species we’ve lived our lives for too long measuring our emotions, our successes and our relationships by length, and not by depth. We have built our lives around the “how long will it take” mentality that has now made us victims, and has blurred our vision through this pandemic.
While we’re being intensely triggered by the needle points of The Survivor Consciousness, it seems we’re miserable, negative, complacent - and everything is taking too damn long.
We’re realising (maybe not yet admitting) that our default is to fight, flight and react – and we’ve done a pretty good job of detonating our internal and external world, because of it. We’re stuck in the outcome of our consciousness. We’re fighting to be heard, living on adrenaline, counting the days between the days, waiting for it all to be over – and everyone’s calling it ‘Resilience’.
Somewhere between the masks and the sanitiser pumps we’ve managed to hashtag resilience as the way to be, and the key constituent in getting us back to where we were. In doing so, we have deepened the fault lines in our groundedness - expecting things to improve, leaders to lead and the virus to – well – just disappear so that we can all get back to what we were busy doing before March 2020.
It ain’t happening. What’s really happening is that we’ve trapped ourselves in the resilience bubble, measuring our days by how quickly we are able to find our way back. There is no back. There is only how, now and next.
We’re breaking apart because we’ve lost sight of how to ‘respond, recover and reimagine’. Many of us are playing in the drama triangles of our lives (CNN we’re looking at you) and not enough in the creator space. Nowhere in this horror story have we witnessed a greater divide than between the optimists, the realists and the pessimists. Each with their own perspectives, and all with their own gas chambers.
But what about a Possibilist? Can we return to a place of possibility? Can we remove ‘outcome’ and ‘survival’ from our mix, and equip ourselves with concrete guidelines to thriving through the challenge; harnessing a society that opts into a less angry, less anxious, more practical, more responsible and more curious way of existing?
We are squarely in the winter of our lives, and there is a fracturing. A right and left and no centre. We should want to mobilise human evolution towards a middle ground, through a mind-and-heart breakthrough. Many of us are seeking to reshape our world from the inside out – but how. By starting a conversation between the left and right camps, that’s how.
There are no more excuses for broken systems, numbness, side-line coaching or dogmatism. As a collective, we need to fully immerse ourselves in the raw truth of this reality and make a choice: do we choose to become a by-product of Covid-19, or do we choose to become a FutureNEXT activator?
We need to return to courage, curiosity and consciousness. We need to seek out what’s real, what’s digestible and what doesn’t need a three-month supply of toilet paper to make its point.
Perhaps it’s time we understood that the future is here already, and it's reshapable; that this reality is not about resilience, nor agility; this is in fact a practice of responsibility, curiosity and wisdom and it’s going to take ‘us’ to reimagine it. Because ultimately, we are fractured - but we are not broken.
By: Futurist, John Sanei, and Economist, Iraj Abedian, address this theme along with so much more in their new book, FutureNEXT, which promises to be a page-turner that, unequivocally, irrevocably, still believes in a wiser world. Sanei and Abedian come together in their second release since their popularised FutureHOW to prove their mastery in cutting the bull and getting straight to the facts; their book is honest, uncomfortable and optimistic, protesting for progress and possibility while all the while offering practical tools that meet the optimists, realists, and pessimists halfway.