You ever get seriously injured, like impaled by something, or break something, and in the proceeding minutes you’re totally cool?
Like yea, that just happened. This is horribly bad. And you’re looking at the accident and see the gaping wound, still totally cool and composed as if it was someone else’s body.
You mentally register the gravity of the accident. But somehow you feel like everything is okay. Like, yea my limb is half severed, or my bone is broken and dangling before my eyes, or yea I’m missing a significant region of flesh on my body from a brutal scrape, or like, yea there’s a giant stick impaling my leg.
Or whatever.
But like. You know things are bad.
You know they will never be the same.
But somehow, it doesn’t seem real. Not immediately.
You see the flaming world trade center tower on TV and you passively think, yea that sucks. But everything will be okay. Then you see the other plane. Whoa. This is worse than i thought. Still, we will get through this.
You watch humans engulfed in flames jump from the smoke bellowing windows 100 stories high, and imagine the horror as they decided to leap to their death, rather than burn alive.
Then, as if time had stopped, the towers come down.
The general attitude is astonishment. Just head scratching “wow”.
It’s only weeks or months or years later than we realize life is much different, that it will never be the same.
That this appearance of a horrific wound that feels otherwise innocuous will change how we live forever.
We fail to grasp how it will change our lives. It’s not real. Despite our imaginative abilities, it’s impossible to conceive a world any other way than the way we’ve known and live it.
Despite this, despite the accompanying denial, the disbelief that we’re witnessing deep trauma that will forever scar the psyche of society, we know, deep inside, that life will never be the same, will not return to normal.
Our lifestyle will be different. The general public attitude will change. Work will change. Economics will change. Security will change.
In some ways life will be the same, but we won’t know in what ways until we have the ample vantage point of looking back, with enough distance to see the change.
I suspect the deterioration we’re witnessing will be worse than we can imagine.
And I don’t wish for suffering, I don’t want the drama of disaster. There is no satisfaction in death and dying and suffering.
But I feel if we appreciate the gravity of the situation, we will be more vigilant to take advantage of the opportunities that this adversity will inevitably present.
The public reaction, hysteria, panic, whatever you want to label it, is a symptom of something deeper.
There is fear, there is unrest.
You may be right, this Virus may, in the final estimation, be a relatively harmless strain that simply accelerates the inevitable demise of the old and week, a natural evolutionary wave to thin the population and strengthen the species.
But our psychosocial reaction to it is more telling.
We literally cannot conceive of how life will be when this situation finally plays itself out, when it’s finally over.
But when it that? Years?Some people think it’ll resume back to normal in weeks. I find that laughable.
Months? Unlikely.
Years? Almost certainly.
2007 mortgage collapse took 6+ years to gain the 50% market value loss.
There’s the hysteria.
There’s the actual virus.
There’s security measures.
There’s surveillance.
There’s economic impacts.
It’s unprecedented.
The 30% of stock market capitalization evaporated in 30 days.
Like, that’s pretty radical.
Like, $4 trillion disappeared.
$4,000,000,000,000. Nbd.
Herro? I guess everything will be back to normal in two weeks 🤪
Does anyone think the market will just do an about face and zoom back up?
Does anyone think that mass quarantine won’t have reverberating impacts on consumer demand?
On unemployment?
Less demand, less businesses making money, less need for workers, more layoffs, meaning less consumers, meaning less demand, more layoffs, less consumers, round and round until we hit some sort of bottom.
This fear…. does anyone here feel like spending, or making any luxury purchases, given all the uncertainty?
I doubt people will be spending freely anytime soon. The market just lost 30%, and its not slowing down.
I imagine everyone will be very conservative…. job security is uncertain. Market demand is weak.
Does anyone think there will be market growth this year? Nah.
JP Morgan, a bank who like others has a lot to lose in this fiasco, and A LOT to gain by giving the market confidence, estimates GDP for 2020 will be…. -1.1.
What a vote of confidence.
And this is just a speculative collapse.
Nothing happened yet.
We’re only a month in.
The sell off happened in sheer anticipation.
10% of the population owns 81% of the stock market capitalization.
We haven’t even seen the impacts.
From Feb 19 to Feb 28 the market dropped 15.5%, when there was only 63 cases in the USA.
We have not even experienced the impacts.
Can you imagine once shit starts hitting the fan?
Once business have mass layoffs?
Let’s assume the virus is mild.
The economic situation is irreversible.
I feel like the COVID is a convenient scape goat for financial market restructuring.
The wealthy have been feeling the pressure for years… the only thing that incentivized them to keep their money in the market was the Fed’s policies, monetary policy, excellent interest rates, incredible tax cuts, government subsidies.
But everyone knew it was a house of cards.
The Virus is simply a convenient mechanism to blame for the run.
That’s what it is.
The wealthy sold off. They ran.
And the impacts of the sell off haven’t even begun.
I’ve always read about these crazy historical events and wondered what it was like to live through it….
Like, what the hell was it like during the Great Depression?
What was is like during the Spanish flu? The Black Plague?
What was it like during the rise of Nazism?
These events are always framed and contextualized retroactively.
At the moment they begin unfolding, there is no frame of reference.
I’ve always wondered what people were thinking as thee events began unfolding.
Were they remotely aware of what was happening?
Could anyone had possibly anticipated the magnitude of the situation? Not just locally, but globally?
If people possessed an awareness of the gravity, would they have behaved differently? Would that have changed their lived outcome?
What is the risk of thinking that life will go on like before? That it will resembled anything remotely similar to before the event?
William Dare 