Imaginable by Jane McGonigal

Author:Jane McGonigal [McGonigal, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Published: 2022-03-22T05:00:00+00:00

“The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell.”7 Within this riddle, posed by Harlem Renaissance author Zora Neale Hurston, we find our answer: we must look back at our recent past to find the challenges that will define our future.

Working through a trauma requires understanding what happened, and why. In the case of COVID-19, this means acknowledging how much of our suffering was a result of long-standing systemic weaknesses in our society, vulnerabilities that the virus took advantage of and put on full display. As the Institute for the Future’s executive director, Marina Gorbis, put it: “It’s not just the virus that’s killing us—it’s our social, economic, and political systems.”8 To achieve collective post-traumatic growth for our post-pandemic planet, we will have to grapple with a difficult fact: many of the illnesses, deaths, and hardships from COVID-19 were preventable. As the virus spread through the world’s population, it was accelerated by societal weaknesses that should have been addressed long ago, namely economic inequality, broken health systems, extreme political divisions, racial injustice, brittle supply chains, overworked workers, and the climate crisis. We can think of these societal weaknesses as “preexisting conditions,” in the same way that old age, diabetes, and heart disease made individuals more vulnerable to the novel coronavirus. At the Institute for the Future, we call these preexisting conditions that made the effects of the pandemic so much worse, and so much harder to recover from, the “deeper disease.”9

The deeper disease will set the stage for the next decade; and the way we address it will largely determine whether we just manage to survive COVID-19 or are transformed for the better by it. These next few pages will by no means offer an exhaustive analysis of everything that went wrong during the pandemic, or every injustice that was suffered in its wake. But I hope they can be a starting point for understanding, growth, and social healing. Let’s first take a look at the symptoms of the deeper disease and how they might manifest again in the future—and then we can start to imagine a cure.

Preexisting Condition #1: Economic Inequality

Economic inequality, defined as an unequal distribution of income and opportunity between different groups in society, is a major cause of suffering in its own right. During the pandemic, its harms were turbocharged: it put many lives disproportionately at risk, and if unaddressed, it will prolong our collective suffering from the virus far into the future.

The most obvious symptom of this preexisting condition was the fact that the virus spread much faster, and took many more lives, among groups who couldn’t work from home or afford to physically distance themselves. A majority of the essential jobs that put people in close contact with the virus were low-paid positions held by the economically insecure: people working in warehouses, care homes, meat plants, waste management facilities, kitchens, and grocery stores, for example. Meanwhile, people who lived in densely packed, multigenerational housing—more common in low-income

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