Will the world be a better place after Covid-19?

Over the past few weeks, we have all been trying to find the positive side to the pandemic; academics and leaders have also joined this trend in an effort to provide us all with inspiration and positivity. For example, Marc Andreessen an entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer  advocates for building something — anything — that moves society forward from here. In his essay, he says that to “reboot the American dream” we need to “demand more of our political leaders, of our CEOs, our entrepreneurs, our investors. We need to demand more of our culture, of our society. And we need to demand more from one another. We’re all necessary, and we can all contribute, to building.” He mentions that much of the technology has already been developed and is readily available; for example in areas such as housing, education, manufacturing and transportation, many of the tools needed to accelerate into a bright new future already exist, but that it’s easier to stick with the systems that once served us well than to replace them.

Professor Jonathan Haidt, an American social psychologist, professor of ethical leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business recently gave his very optimistic view, reinforcing the notion that we’ll look back on the pandemic as an inspiration for what was one of the greatest collective efforts, both forming new alliances and innovations such that we could flatten this curve, get past it and hopefully a new generation of leaders and activists and very socially-minded people that realise that obviously we’re much stronger together, in that institutions matter and that we get through this and are much more prepared and more able to face these things with much greater vigour and resilience.

Individually, it is important to adhere to a mindset that allows us to reach the end of this being better off, in some way. However, in a societal level this is much more complicated. Not all crises have always led to positive results, and sometimes, if they did, this took decades and even generations. Human progress' long and winding road has a tendency to head towards justice. That said, often the process is so long, slow and even confusing that exceeds our lifetime and patience greatly. We are not able to predict nor understand how this pandemic will affect our societies or human history at present, and we probably won't be able to for at least some years to come, but we can certainly begin by making positive changes to human behaviour, individually and collectively; hopefully generations to come will find the results of our efforts to have positively contributed to human progress.

In the meantime, if you would like to work on your mindset to make sure that you come out of this with the tools to achieve your goals and improve your life, get it touch to find out how I can help you.