Despite being nearly two years into one of the worst pandemics certainly in U.S. History, let alone the world, it’s surprising that I’m still seeing articles written by people (I’m assuming they mean well) who can’t wait to tell us what this pandemic has or is teaching us about ourselves. Most articles and opinion pieces from publications like Forbes, The Washington Post, AARP, Business Insider focus on superficial changes like finding new daily patterns and how we interact with people or emotional re-calibrations surrounding subjects like fostering resilience and dealing with tragedy.
Personally, out of all the publications I have managed to read, I think Wired has come the closest to sharing something that resembles a global lesson, namely that we humans aren’t learning from our history, especially clioepidemiology.
The problem though, is that I don’t believe these things to be major revelations. Rather most of that stuff, in my opinion, is always inside people, but it just takes a significant global or national tragedy to bring it out. It shouldn’t, but that’s a whole other discussion for another time. My point however, is that given the right circumstances, I believe these things(?) would be brought out in most people anyway, so it’s not really a surprise or a true revelation, not to mention most of these examples are rather vague and don’t necessarily have the same impact on everyone.
But there are two truths I believe this pandemic has revealed to the majority, if not everyone. But if you want to know what those truths are, you’ll have to slide on over into Medium to read the rest by either clicking the title or previous link.