2020. The year of the long reflection.
Our time to reflect changes everyone and everything. If we allow it.
The world is a delicate thing. It moves by increments in our thoughts and deeds and, when are able to notice, we change. This process leaves us wanting and simultaneously, fearful. In 2020, we have been afforded a moment that has been rare in the past several decades. A time to reflect.
This gift, is a moment to step off the self-imposed train of responsibility and measurement for roles that we worked our lives to achieve. For many of us, that train has stopped and left us at a depot that we don’t recognize, looking around realizing this place is our life, the one that supported our daily ride. And it is no longer relevant.
Plainly, this is about time, time to think about where and what we are in this world and how we do …it. When the world pauses the ability to reflect moves new things to the forefront. It’s a powerful agent of change that affords us the ability to alter our thinking and our path forward.
i. Killing nearly one third of Europe the bubonic plague was responsible for many cultural evolutions. It created vast gaps in society and left the ‘norms’ of life unfinished or incomplete. Due to the randomness of death rates the ensuing migrations of populus to non-plague villages fueled the need for differing dialects to adapt. This collision is theorized to be responsible for the great vowel shift in the English language. Without this time of reflection and adaptation the English speaking world would have sounded entirely different.
ii. Later during that period in history chivalric wars were declining. This made the labor that supported them, available, despite their shrinking numbers. Three inventions; the plow, the horses yoke and the horseshoe changed productivity in agricultural production. This led to profound changes in diet, commerce, population and irrevocable changes in the monarchies that ruled their domain. The world, with less people in it, were able to reflect and realize inventions that adapted human existence and led to major shifts in productivity and prosperity. These deficits in time and fewer people motivated the ones who were left to ponder better approaches to work. Progress ensued.
iii. The financial depression of 1929 in the US let loose a flurry of changes in humanity and consumer behavior. Work and money being scarce, people left areas of the Northeast and Midwest to find greener pastures. With scare income, people attended movies which became an affordable place to escape the bad news of the day and spend the better part of it away from home, sometimes all day. Violence, protests and civil disruption increased along with it’s older brother organized crime. The ‘pancaking’ of society under financial calamity forced a mass reflection and reassessment of privilege, labor, class and consumption of goods, legal or illegal. Social systems, government, society and war reordered the structures that had developed over the past several centuries.
Time and reflection is the steam in the engine of change. It invents new ideas, concepts, discussions, directions and actions. When you stop the thinking about the next hour, next day or next week you are in the act of reinventing.
On the threshold of a large change to our world, our ability to reflect and use the insights gained from this year will be valuable for generations.
Post reflection norms
- Increased alternative consumerism (‘feeling good’ for a better future)
- Replaced formalities (greetings, touch)
- Frictionless/touchless services
- Upcycling (reusing/repurposing old purchases)
- Increased use of meditation/reflective exercises
- Stress management
- Societal normalization of mental health issues
- Work/Life mix optimized for impact, not wage
- Augmented, enhanced work/task technologies
- Safe contact events (in demand, decreasing post-pandemic)
Today our cultures of community, business and religion are rife with behaviors and practices that, are to many, completely insane. Yet they still continue to this day.
Why?
We repeat these moirés because the people who depend and control them haven’t been afforded the time to reflect and change.
Until this year, 2020.
If you are concerned with your government, your workplace or your place in society you can be cautiously assured that things can improve if we break the bad cycles of behavior.
We must change ourselves. If history tells us anything the implications of that very behavior are earth-shaking, whole, sensory and irreversible. If we don’t, our old ideas will weigh is down and hopes of manifesting a bright, possible future will become distant.
Many new movements, community adaptations, empathetic activities and acts of social awareness have sprouted. These are the early sounds of our future calling us …and we must follow them.
In 2020, we are afforded the ability to transform and realize the things that until now, we only hoped for. And as bleak as the world may seem, think of all those times in history where humanity overcame strife and brought profound change to the world.
“Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.” — Nathaniel Hawthorne