How to Stay Sane While the World Falls Apart
The shit is officially hitting the fan. The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, meaning it’s spreading faster than we can control it. Even before the officials started to admit that we’re in for a wild ride, media outlets, marketers, and opportunists started flooding our senses with alarming news, wild predictions of catastrophe, and advice ranging from “buy all the toilet paper you can” to “drink bleach.”
Don’t drink bleach.
This is the perfect example of a VUCA environment: Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous. Models of the disease’s spread are lagging new data as it pours in. The virus that causes it is mutating as I write this. Healthy people — physically healthy, anyway — are hoarding supplies of equipment that, if made available to sick people and their medical caregivers, would keep the disease from spreading. The Big 5 tech companies are sending their employees home, and basically every major event is being cancelled with no clear plans to reconvene.
You are probably reading the news daily — or, worse, having it curated for you by alarmists in your social feeds — while vacillating between a total freakout and nonchalance. Good. That means you’re human. Unfortunately, it also means you’re making a very human mistake by trying to solve a problem that’s too complex. This is a dire…
