As we wade into year two of this marathon, there’s one group on which we all rely, yet who in return receive little to none of the care that they so expertly give. Here are some thoughts around what we can do for the caregivers.
Before the pandemic began, I already had deep admiration and respect for my wife, by every possible metric. Not only has she been an exceptional mother, always showing up for the children she raised on her own for a decade before I arrived — after she lost her husband when they were toddlers. Throughout, she has also remained as competent and dedicated an executive as I’ve ever met, shouldering increasing amounts of responsibility in the healthcare industry, as more and more of her employers’ sprawling portfolios came under her capable leadership.
She is a master juggler.
The bad news is life is on hold. The good news is that not everyone is sitting still, while we are hiding. In fact, the opposite is true. Innovation in pretty much every sphere of life is in sixth gear. Here is a glimpse at what is incubating, and why you may want to dust off your ideas now.
I get it. You have COVID ennui. I do, too, but as long as we have our health and our jobs, both 2020 and 2021 deserve nothing but to be met with gratitude.
Not everyone is as lucky.
The truth is, until last year sent us hiding, we were all running at full tilt with our default lives, scarcely stopping to smell the flowers, or survey the garden. And no matter how good our lives may be, personally, we’d be hard-pressed not to see that a lot of our systems are showing some pretty enormous stress fractures. …
Everything in life is comprised of complexity—a sliding scale between extremes. And yet, we judge ourselves and one another according to either-or edicts and dogmas, causing undue suffering. Here are some thoughts and strategies.
We love to define things in binary terms. It’s easier that way, for two reasons. First, black/white, safe/dangerous, good/bad labels use up less brain power. “Close enough is good enough” in most cases, after which many of us allow ourselves to stop thinking about them. Second, we can’t help but judge everything we experience, and a binary system of labels allows us to do just that, efficiently.
Just witness our confusion, and visceral reactions, to issues of race or sexuality.
Race
When it comes to race, it becomes quickly complex. In the U.S. in 1970, just 1% of babies born were…
A century of industrialization has made us ironically weaker, less happy and less able to share in its spoils, turning it into a Faustian bargain. While we cannot go backward, there is a path to rediscovering our former fortitude.
Until the majority of humans fell to the transformative impacts of the Machine Age some hundred or so years ago, when power generation, electricity, the automobile, factories, and telecommunications all conspired to dramatically alter how we lived and interacted, a common set of governing principles underpinned life on Earth for more than ten thousand years.
Unless you were a noble.
Chief among these was the fact that life required immense personal effort. Most of us made our own homes from trees we cut down, and we also made everything in them. We raised animals and planted gardens. We made our…
The divergent strategies deployed in the two cities (and nations) where I divide my life have led to very different outcomes, economically and psychologically. And yet, their death tolls are nearly indistinguishable. Here’s what I’ve observed, and concluded.
I truly thought I was done with writing about the pandemic, after a year of reflection fed by a “split life” spent in two distinct realities — those of New York and Toronto, or Trump’s America and Trudeau’s Canada — with regard to the laws and behaviors that have come to define life in each city, and nation. …
We have engineered a society of competitors based on a false notion of inherent scarcity. Our fear-based narrative has fueled bids to control resources and outcomes, sowing mistrust. The rules and groupthink that grew out of this narrative to protect it are robbing us of our true potential.
I’ve never been as aware of the human predisposition toward pack mentality — the urge to be part of something bigger than us, and to find safety in numbers — as when I have stood opposed to any particular instance of groupthink. When it has happened, the act of going against the grain has more often than not triggered strong reactions in others: insecurities or fears, against which my dissenting beliefs or choices somehow represent a threat.
I’ve written before that rules and laws — the things that shape rituals and norms — exist for two primary reasons: first, to…
Homelessness is not necessary. It is the result of our collective inaction, there to be solved, but left to fester. Three nations’ starkly different approaches show the impact of our choices.
“The only common denominator to homelessness is that they lack a home. This must be the starting point.”
That stunningly simple yet powerful statement was made in a four-nation symposium on Zoom that I attended, by architect Juha Kaakinen on the subject of homelessness. Kaakinen is the CEO of non-profit housing provider Y-Foundation, in Finland, and is the man behind their near-eradication of homelessness. While every country in Europe has seen increases in homelessness since 2008, Finland alone has seen a precipitous drop.
The reason? Kaakinen says, “We started on that path [toward ending homelessness] when we changed our thinking…
In modern times, science has bled us of our evolutionary biological ability to live, unaided. While this speaks to our ingenuity, there is also a massive hidden cost.
It’s paradoxical. There’s no other way to describe it. The one thing that life guarantees us, other than being born, is that we will die. Between these two events, our lives unfold. The problem is that until science came along, our attitude toward dying was healthy. We knew it would happen, at some point. We accepted this fact. We planned for its eventuality. We built narratives that drew death into life’s other rituals, framing them in a larger context. We were grateful for the time we were given. And we carried on.
To do otherwise was as fruitless as it…
Human beings have nearly capped an astounding feat in what amounts to a cosmic nanosecond: the wholesale replacement of every natural system on the planet we inherited, for one we have engineered for convenience. What we do next will seal our fate.
Animals used to roam the planet. Now, they sit yoked and broken, until they’re ready to harvest for parts. We used to catch seasonal rainfall. Now, we empty the world’s aquifers to eat strawberries in February. We used to pray for ten fingers and toes. We increasingly purchase engineered outcomes. We used to dress for the season. Now we dress for the hour. We used to breathe fresh air. Now, we hide from it, lest it kill us. We used to live and die by the hand we were dealt. Now, we have a pill for everything. We used to…
When the chips are down, we find out what we, and others around us, are made of. It is through adversity more than anything else that we find ourselves, and forge lasting bonds.
The measure of a thing can only be taken accurately in times of challenge. That’s because everything works in its optimal environment. Sometimes, the fact that it works has little to do with the thing itself, but rather pure circumstance, or context.
It’s only when we stress-test something that we understand where its edges and limits are, how much we can rely on it to play its expected or designed role, and in what circumstances, how often, and how well. Ultimately, through these tests, we can determine how valuable a thing is to us. …
