Accentuate the positive.

We’re at the start of an enforced lockdown here in the UK.  It’s for a good reason.  Hopefully, the effects of this will be felt in the same way as pulling off a sticking plaster.  A short, sharp shock, fading discomfort, and a return to normal.  But perhaps it should be a NEW normal?

As a self-employed freelancer, I have three jobs.  I’ve lost two of them in the past week due to the imposed movement restrictions, and the third one earns me a pittance I can’t live on.  I hope I can one day get them back, but nothing is certain.  I’m frantically looking for another job in the grocery supply chain – our country’s only growth industry at present.

I was supposed to be leaving the UK in the Autumn for an extended sojourn in the USA and Canada to focus solely upon my writing.  Now, I have no idea if that’ll still be possible; if it’ll ever be possible.

At first, I was furious at the travel ban and lockdown, and frightened by what it would mean for my financial security and ongoing career opportunities.  Now, I’ve lapsed into a state of reluctant resignation.  Life can be crap sometimes.  No one wants this.  I’ve got to make the best of it, same as everyone else.

I’ve come to the conclusion some good can come out of this turbulence.  We can use this enforced hiatus to take a good, long look at how we live. 

Speaking as a First-Worlder, if we continue to consume resources with reckless abandon, deforestation and devastation will accelerate.  Wild animals, who should live safe and peaceful lives far away from us, are now closer to humanity than ever before, and correspondingly damaged by our actions.  They’re eating our plastic and dying before they’ve been able to reproduce.  They’re traded in Third World markets.  They’re eaten by desperately poor, hungry people.  Their pathogens – never designed to come into contact with humans – now leap to us.  We have no antibodies to fight off germs we were never meant to encounter.  Ebola is an example, annihilating rural African communities…the dark, unknown, undefeatable ‘death from the forest’.

If we continue to factory farm livestock that’s pumped full of antibiotics, and fed on the pelleted remains of other factory-farmed animals, can we really be that amazed by the appearance of BSE, Swine-flu, Bird-flu, and plenty of other nasties just like them?

We’re at a fork in the road.  Let’s take the correct path, rather than the easy one.  Let’s clean up our act.  It may not feel like it right now, while we’re worried about health and wealth like never before – but there could just be an upside to this thing.

Have you ever spent so much ‘unhurried’ time with your kids, and been quite as engaged with the people they’re becoming, what they’re learning, and how they’re absorbing it?

Have you ever had as many earnest conversations with your nearest and dearest about what truly matters?

Have you ever made so much effort to ring your Nan, or FaceTime friends you can’t meet up with?

I’ve certainly never seen so many people out walking, jogging, and cycling as I have in the past couple of weeks.  I’ve never heard as many kids playing in back gardens in the sunshine.  I’ve never before seen pictures of dolphins in the usually-filthy canals of cruise-ship-decimated Venice, or found local town air to be so clear of traffic fumes.

Of course, not all businesses can survive without customers physically visiting them – leisure clubs, restaurants, beauty salons, retail outlets, my own training company – but some CAN.  We are a service economy.  So much of what we do is office and computer-based.  Some companies (if the UK broadband infrastructure is beefed up to properly cope) can keep their employees ‘remote working’ for ever more. Benefits?  Plenty! 

Reduced traffic on the roads means less pollution.  Release from the nine to five delivers employees empowered to individually manage their work/life balance.  Without the daily commute, fewer of these rotten bugs will leap from passenger to passenger in a crowded train or packed lift.  Plus, people will have more money to spend on reviving our post-virus economy if they’re not wasting a third of their earnings simply getting to work.

Imagine how much happier and better-functioning our population would be if they had time to do the things that matter, instead of sitting stationary on the M25 for an hour every morning and night?  Communities will return with a vengeance.  Being around to wave to, chat on the driveway, help and be helped, binds us together. It’s important.  It’s how the pack survives. 

Freeing people from the confines of the office can ensure fewer distractions and interruptions, delivering greater productivity.  Sure, companies’d have to set goals, perhaps introduce performance-related bonuses, monitor when people were logging in to ensure work discipline – but this is easily achievable by the super-nerds.  If we can send probes to detect water on Saturn’s moons, we can figure out a way to check whether Bob from Acquisitions has logged on for his required 40 hours a week.

Permanent home working can reduce business overheads, too.  No need to spend the money on a big, expensive HQ with no one in it.  Put the cash into improved Comms instead.  These huge buildings with ample parking can then be converted into residential units, providing more construction jobs and the extra housing capacity our country urgently needs – without sacrificing our beautiful green spaces to concrete jungles.

We might even consider *gasp* paying more money to the people we are increasingly going to rely on during these inevitable future outbreaks – the nurses, the care workers, the supermarket shelf-stackers, the bin men, the emergency services, the guys at the sewage treatment works.  While we’re at it, let’s pay dairy farmers a fair price for good quality milk.  Let’s pay the livestock farmer a realistic price to rear healthy, outdoor-bred, well-fed meat that’ll taste better as a result and won’t be full of silent killers we currently devour without a qualm.  Let’s eat fruit and veg that isn’t coated with pesticides which kill insects, poison the water table, and screw up the biodiversity of the food chain so we have to artificially engineer it back, putting ourselves at greater risk in the process as we ingest more and more chemicals and expect our bodies to cope with them.

I appreciate all this blue-sky thinking won’t work for every industry…and that we need serious, focused Government spending on infrastructure to make even a fraction of it possible (how slow is your broadband, ‘cos mine is deathly, and I only live an hour outside London), but isn’t it worth lateral thought and strategic investment if we improve our overall quality of life?  Shelve the white-elephant that is HS2, and divert the money into fibre broadband to every home, massively-widened bandwidth, and properly-functioning mobile networks with comprehensive coverage.

Dinosaurs were the dominant species on planet earth for MILLIONS of years.  Where are they now?  And they were taken down by a massive rock from outer space – they didn’t cock it up for themselves.  The human race has managed a measly few hundred thousand years, and we’re already teetering on our own, self-created brink.  This is the only planet in our solar system – the ONLY planet – that can support complex life; yet we’re systematically destroying it and all the species it supports…including ourselves – and we think we’re so smart!

Let’s not just wait for COVID-19 to blow over – as it eventually will – carry on exactly as before, and then be horrified by next winter’s brand new pandemic, doubtless as terrifying and destructive as the one we’re grappling with now.  Let’s use this first truly-global crisis as a wake-up call; a reset button; the chance to turn a corner and right our wrongs.  Let it usher in a new way to think, work, and behave.  Let it be a lesson we teach our kids.  It’s not someone else’s problem.  It’s up to you, me; all of us.