The New Normal Will NOT be the Old Normal

Image if you would, enjoying an idle Tuesday in Pompeii, one fall day in AD 79. Suddenly Rome’s “Las Vegas” is turned literally to dust in the space of 48 hours, buried under 30 feet of volcanic ash, courtesy of the eruption of nearby Mount Vesuvius. While the vast majority of the population escaped, life was never the same, the entire city was abandoned and most had to start over with nothing.

Whenever this Coronacrisis is over, we can expect the fallout to be long and hard. Some estimates say as many as 30% of businesses will fail. Unemployment will be higher than in the great depression and house prices may fall 25%. I am not being alarmist, but I study many sources and it’s going to be bad. Yet many of the people I talk to, including my own kids, are just waiting until it’s over, like everything will just go back to normal. My daughter in her mid-twenties apparently does not think that both the restaurants she worked at might go under (they were both struggling before this crisis), and that restaurant jobs might be hard to find. But she doesn’t like online learning and so she’s not interested in using this time to develop new skills (frustrating).

None of us can afford to wait until it’s over before we start reinventing:

Our lives

Careers