I’m not trying to scare anyone here – but it’s something that we should think about. What if the world we knew a month ago never comes back? The world of seniors on cruises and millennials doing the digital nomad thing – the world of cheap travel, open borders, and easy access….
The truth is – all of that might be gone forever. We might now be living in a world now where you have to provide a reason for wanting to go somewhere, you have to quarantine for weeks when you get there, and the cost goes up exponentially.
I don’t think we are all going to die (but we might) and I don’t think that our entire civilization is going to crumble into some mash-up of Mad Max and Bladerunner (but it might) however, I do think it is likely that there will never be a return to January of 2020.
At the minimum, the next two months are going to re-arrange supply lines, change the habits of a majority of humans, force the adoption of digital socialization and digital work, and destroy the travel and hospitality industry as we knew it. Honestly, this has already happened.
I think the days of Spring Break and Gap Year Travel and Backpacker Trails are done. We are moving into something else at warp speed – but I’m not sure what form it will take. The days of Baby Boomers selling their house and starting a blog were already done, the days of millennials buying a van and driving around the country are now done, and my Gen X generations days of riding local transport to couch surfing hosts – well, those days were already done too. Hopefully, this will also be the end of the mega-rich doing whatever they want, wherever they want – but judging from this story, that is probably too optimistic.
Here we are folks. Something new is about to be born.
I don’t have a fucking clue what it is. We’ve got a whole lot of pain ahead of us – that’s for certain. If we are among the grieving instead of among the dead – we can figure it all out…I think it’s time we started thinking about the world we want to live in, instead of the world we were born into – because while we still have the limitations of the world we live in – we don’t have the world that came before us dictating how we move forward any longer
Namaste friends. Live long and prosper.