On Getting Ready

Some of us have a choice. A choice of how to live during this plague. Many of us, of course, have not been given that choice.

This includes the healthcare workers, the grocers and construction workers, the myriad people who keep the electricity on, the food supplied, and the trash from piling up in the streets. This also includes those working on therapies and vaccines who must quarantine at work away from their families. Undoubtedly, these essential workers deserve our solidarity, our gratitude and combat pay for their efforts.

In the meantime, the rest of us are left to while away the days at home. Many knowledge workers depending on Zoom and Slack to get by and recreate some semblance of a normal work day. Others still have less free time now than they did before due to new caregiving demands (the task of homeschooling children, for example) that possibly overlap with their paid work.

But for a large number of people (myself very much included), there is more time in the day than we know what to do with. While I’ve added some disclaimers about who may not be in the group I’m describing, you know if you’re on the side of society with too much new time because you are suddenly aware of  the vast expanses of time and feel the need to fill it somehow. And if you are facing this new expanse, we have to reckon with something.

We have a choice to make. We can focus on simply surviving this plague, or we can prepare for what’s next.

Surviving is the path I’ve taken so far. It has consisted of working for a biotech client that’s adapting to the Covid-19 world. Since my client is in California, it means I’ve been working on “West Coast time” which mostly means working whenever I can, in a completely unstructured way. It means going for runs around the Capitol in the morning as my means of mental and physical wellness. It means watching an embarrassing amount of TV. It means my partner and I writing down seven activities a week on little slips of paper and putting them in a hat and pulling out one a day—things like cooking Thanksgiving dinner and reading poetry aloud or drinking champagne and disco dancing. It means reading a completely unhealthy amount of news and scrolling endlessly on Twitter. It means Zoom parties and talking on the phone more than normal (and I already talk on the phone a lot). It means drinking way too much. It means saving a lot of money by having almost zero discretionary spending. It means daydreaming about moving to the beach to ride this out if we really have to wait 18 months for a vaccine. It means signing up for a human challenge trial because wait, fuck no, we can’t afford to wait 18 months for a vaccine.

Survival isn’t so bad. On net, my physical health is probably about even. On the positive side, I’m eating out almost zero times a week, exercising a little more, and not flying on planes constantly. In the “loss” column, I’m drinking a lot more and reclining while I work (and if sitting is the new smoking, I have to imagine reclining is as bad if not worse). My mental health seems a lot worse in the sense that I didn’t think much about my mental health prior to the pandemic, and now I worry about my anxiety (for instance, what does it mean to be short of breath, am I breathing deeply enough?) and have some trouble sleeping. These don’t seem to be serious problems, and on some level, it’s reasonable to be anxious about a global pandemic that has stalled large parts of the global economy seemingly indefinitely.

There is a spectrum of survival that goes from successfully treading water (what I’m doing) on one end to just barely staying alive on the other. I’m afraid of the sort of common equilibria that a lot of people will ultimately achieve. Many people will become depressed and addicted. Others will avoid that fate, but their skills will be irrelevant in this new future or still-critical skills will atrophy from disuse. Organizational networks and knowledge will fray and dissipate. Human and institutional capital will decay.

This decay is particularly toxic because on the other side of this plague there will be a lot of work to be done. Rebuilding what is still needed of our old world and starting from scratch on the new one. However this gets done, it will be a global effort in civilization building. We do not want to undertake this with a citizenry that is less skilled, knowledgeable, and able than the one we have now. More so, I am not currently the person I would want to be tasked with rebuilding our world, and if you’re honest with yourself, you probably aren’t either. If we choose survival, worse versions of our current selves will be the people tasked with rebuilding.

Our other option is to get ready. We will never be ready, but instead, we must decide to get ready—I think we’ve all learned as much. We should do our best to prepare for the task ahead;  in the myriad preparations we will build both human capital and resilience, resilience being perhaps the meta-ability that we need to develop most. What you do to get ready should be based on your own forecasts, existing talents, and preferences, but I see three categories of need: entrepreneurial and operational skills, moral capacity, and cultural production.

Entrepreneurial and Operational skills: We need to get ready to build from scratch and to scale our existing infrastructure.

The first category of need is that the the private, public and non-profit sectors will all need to come together to successfully rebuild the infrastructure of a society, and to do so, we will need many talented people to help. In a very real sense, we will need new enterprises to serve both our new needs and our existing needs that have new constraints. Some of these constraints may be:

• Risk management reducing appetite for lean, just in time, global supply chains
• >20% prime age unemployment
• Ongoing and cascading financial crises
• State and municipal bankruptcies
• Falling life expectancy due to a crippled healthcare system
• Falling life expectancy due to addiction and suicide
• A delayed generation of students with permanently reduced human capital

These constraints represent a drastic change in the operating environment and mean we will be operating in a dramatically poorer society in terms of health, state capacity, and human and financial capital. As a result, we will need talented individuals to focus on new wealth creation more than ever before. It will no longer be enough for our best and brightest to carefully shepherd our existing stock of wealth via finance, consulting and management of Fortune 500 companies. Undoubtedly those professions can make operational contributions that generate new wealth, but that will require a change in focus from the incremental to the exponential. This means investing in new ventures with time, effort and shoestring capital in greater amounts than ever before. In the public sector, this could mean the creation of a new government agency responsible for public health—not just pandemics, but substantial efforts to improve nutrition, fitness and lead remediation would create huge windfalls of human health and are within the reach of driven and imaginative people. The public and non-profit sectors may finally realize what a crisis homelessness is when they have to forestall mass evictions. Hopefully they will realize the problem is just supply and demand driving prices above people’s ability to pay and build more housing until prices falls. Perhaps the non-profit sector will realize how mismanaged and poorly targeted many of their missions are as they face a true crisis and are unable to help.

If these issues are of interest, what you should do? You should study and you should practice what you learn.

Potential areas of focus:

• Entrepreneurship and management—this is a tricky topic to learn because most decent entrepreneurs are just growing businesses. There is very little good writing on these topics but these stand out: High Output Management by Andy Grove, The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman, Paul Graham’s essays. Practicing creating things people want will be the best way to learn.
• Operations, Supply Chain Logistics and Manufacturing Process—there may be a manufacturing and supply chain renaissance as enterprises focus on resilience rather than efficiency.
• Construction—there will be pent up demand for construction, especially after already facing a dire housing shortage in many cities pre-Covid-19.
• Niche topics to build businesses around—follow your interests that overlap with the types of things people are willing to pay for.
• Public administration and public health—while I think the rules of these games will be changed dramatically, it’s important to know them before breaking them.
• Specific public health topics— including but not limited to mental health, addiction, nutrition, fitness, biology of metabolic syndrome, and cancer.
• Non-profits—I would read effective altruism critiques of traditional non-profits, then read critiques of effective altruism, then…find someone smarter than me.

How to learn? Read everything you can, ask experts to talk about their expertise (we know many of them are at home with free time), come prepared with questions about the current state and potential future states.

How to practice? Write about potential action plans, share that writing with experts (and non-experts), and ask to discuss. Practice the skills needed to execute the plan—for example, in construction, calling City Hall and asking about permitting exceptions or interviewing and evaluating subcontractors.  When possible, put small versions into practice.

Moral capacity: We need to get ready to do hard things because they are right.

 The second category of desperate need now and in the future is what I’m calling moral capacity—the ability to contemplate what it means to be good and to then act on one’s understanding. I have found myself left alone in the quiet and disquiet of my home—forced there by understanding that going out and being with others at this time is wrong. It carries with it a slight probability of killing someone. And so we must not. Because of this, I find myself acknowledging what we all really knew—that our everyday actions are often not morally neutral. As such, we could all do better. We’ve been making choices with the slight probability of killing someone already—we’ve just been ignoring it. With the time to evaluate my actions and life, I’ve thought dramatically more about what being good might mean and what I can do about it. Throughout I’ve also found myself mostly without the tools to think about these questions and more so without the community to act with and for. Without many discretionary distractions, it’s become all too clear that I am not the community member or citizen that I want to be. I doubt I am alone.

In times of economic growth and technological progress, perhaps the anomie and atomization of modern life were an acceptable trade. Given the task before us, one that we cannot accomplish without personal sacrifice, unprecedented solidarity, and moral vision—anomie will not suffice.

What will a modern moral capacity look like? It will look like people truly caring about what is right, while allowing for competing versions of morality to flourish and be acted upon. It will be a morality keenly focused on action. It will look like people taking actions that don’t align with their preferences because they are right. We are all getting a small lesson in this moral capacity during the lockdowns. We are staying in because it is right. Despite the fact that it is no fun, and that the longer it goes on it will come with ever greater sacrifices. Yet, we persevere. I hate to see the cracks coming to our moral courage already. I hate it especially because so much more will be asked of us.

How can we practice building moral capacity? I think faith traditions give us some guidance, and they mostly seem to indicate that it is practice that builds our moral capacity. It is prayer, meditation, fasting and study. It is carving out time for contemplation and the hard work of thinking for ourselves. It will mean turning off Netflix. It will mean reading old philosophical and religious texts or listening to On Being with Krista Tippett. It will mean deciding for ourselves to focus on what is right and what is wrong even though it’s uncool, even when doing so requires of us things we don’t want to do, and especially even when going back to pretending most things are morally neutral becomes an option again.

Our own moral contemplation is only the first piece of moral capacity. The second piece is the ability to act on one’s understanding. Action requires a sort of personal activation energy to overcome inertia, but it also requires connection to a community of others who share similar moral goals and who can reinforce your conviction, improve your thinking, and give you operational scale when needed. Some of these communities exist or existed 50 years ago but have fallen or frayed- things like civic organizations (the Lion’s Club or the Independent Order of Oddfellows), religious congregations, city politics and commissions. We’re now beginning to see the fruition of potential modern alternatives, like mutual aid groups form around Google spreadsheets to help neighbors during lockdowns. None of these things, old and new, are or were perfect, but they allow for the contemplation of what was right with a focus on acting upon issues that were in front of them.

I can imagine new moral communities springing up and hope that they do. Since I have the time, I’m going to consider what is right and wrong, whether I am making the world a materially a better place, and hopefully figure out how to act in a way that is good. If you’ve made it this far, I hope you do too.

Cultural Production: We need to get ready to create a culture worth saving.

 The third category of need is building a civilization in which people’s intellects, senses and spirits flourish and prosper as much as our physical infrastructure does. We’ve seen people take their passions much more seriously during the lockdown period. Amateurism and avocations have made a comeback in a big way. The question “what is art for” has been resoundingly answered for our moment. Art is for surviving a plague. It helps us remember that things weren’t always this way, and they won’t they won’t always be this way.

In the months and years to come, I hope we will remember that making music, recording home movies and writing bad essays (ahem) allowed us to express something like the fullness of human drama when our worlds were so small. There is something freeing and gratifying in amateurism and production that allows a silly pride. We become part of long traditions that will hopefully exist beyond the existence of the Earth (with Mozart, Chuck Berry and Azerbaijani folk music already in interstellar space aboard the Voyager probes, we’ve got a decent chance at this). We become more careful consumers of culture and better critics when we produce culture ourselves.

The possibilities are too great, and individual skills and passion too diverse to outline them here, so I will tell you what I plan to do. I plan to write for an hour a day. I plan to read fiction or belles lettres for an hour a day. I will lean on my much more culturally wise partner to show me new movies and music. I will watch operas online. I will try my best to turn those inputs into better outputs. I will applaud amateur cultural production wherever I see it. We can create art.  We can write our own stories. The rest of the human drama is ours, so we should get ready.

We have time to get ready.

We were not ready for this pandemic. We did not use the time we had when we saw it coming to get ready. We have time to get ready for our post-lockdown future. We can see unprecedented mass unemployment. We can see a biotech sector that needs more investment and skilled labor. We can see the need to build a public health agency that can respond to not just this crisis, but our ongoing health crises. We can see the need for onshore manufacturing capacity. We can see the need to build more resilience into our supply chains. We can see how housing shortages and mass incarceration make us vulnerable.  We can see the need to build competent government agencies and non-profits. These are the things that we can see. Will we get ready? Or will the lockdowns end, a vaccine arrive, and only then start to get smart and able? If we build entrepreneurial and operational skills soon, we can start building for a new normal that is healthier and wealthier than we were in 2019.

To do all of the above, we will have to build out our willingness and ability to decide what is right and then pursue those acts. Even when it sucks. Even when we don’t want to. Especially when no one expects us to. Our moral capacity will be the difference between a recovery that is measured in years or decades.

To stay motivated for years of building, we will have to remember what we are building for. Yes, we are building for a society where people aren’t dying in overflowing hospitals. Yes, we are building for a world where basic health and security are ensured. But we’re also building for a world that makes intellectual and artistic progress, a world where every one of us takes part in a culture that would be envied by some future textbook reader. Rather than surviving and returning to the world as we knew it, we should aim to thrive and use the remains of what was to rebuild something much better. Cultural production brings us as close to the source of inspiration and enlightenment as is practical. It reminds us of why we must get ready.

 

This has been over 3,000 words all to say that I hope during this plague we will get ready to undertake the following in a very serious way.

1. Do the hard work to provide the things others need.
2. Try, really try, to be good.
3. Nourish the mind and spirit like life depends on it.

If we’re honest, many of us weren’t doing these things before. And now, the world will ask us to do them all. We may never truly be ready. But we can see that we will be called upon. Get ready.