Before discussing the post-coronavirus world, it helps to understand that the deeper cause of the virus was that it was a nature-sent reaction to the egoistic, competitive and exploitative way we were living our lives.
Nature sent us this virus in order to clean away the excess waste we had been accumulating in our paradigm of each one trying to maximally profit off of others in a race to individual success.
Our overinflated egoistic approach to life would have eventually led to major suffering, such as a world war. However, the coronavirus came along instead. It somewhat purifies us in a much calmer way than if we had let our tensing relations reach an explosive peak.
There Is Nothing Detrimental in Nature
Many perceive the coronavirus as a major catastrophe, but when we gain an understanding of nature’s laws and modus operandi, we see that there is nothing detrimental in nature.
We were causing harm to each other in our mutually inconsiderate and divisive attitudes, and then the coronavirus came along in order to distance us from each other, giving us a chance to review how and why we live our lives the way we do.
Now that nature has caringly and ingeniously discarded of the garbage that we had been gathering, we have an opportunity to fill our relations with love and kindness—to reestablish human society in a much brighter and more positive way for our children and grandchildren.
I thus hope that we will successfully utilize this coronavirus period to impact a positive shift in our attitudes to each other, and in the social constructions that we build herein.
I also hope that we will leave behind all the social division, hatred, xenophobia, exploitation, manipulation, abuse, depression, stress and anxiety of the old egoistic world, and make a significant leap into a new and opposite world of positive connection, love, equality, support, encouragement, happiness, confidence, altruism, care and mutual responsibility.
Reject the Old Egoistic World. Seek a New Mutually-Considerate One
Billions of dollars are currently being invested by governments in the hope that we will revive the rat race we were running before the coronavirus struck us. It would be very unfortunate if we do. I greatly doubt that doing so would be positive for anybody.
While we are now in a widely acknowledged state of crisis, we hear very little about how before the coronavirus, we were in another crisis. Our intensifying divisive relations in societies and between countries—especially between America, Russia, China and Europe—as well as various other factions, were leading us to war, and to financial and industrial collapse.
When we understand the extent of the crisis we were headed toward, we then view the coronavirus pandemic as a life buoy that nature threw out to us.
Therefore, we would be wise to realize that there was nothing positive in our old world, and thus nothing worth returning to. It was a world being devastated by our extraction of every resource we could get our hands on.
Also, the irony of our old world is that it was based on us all trying to enjoy ourselves, yet finding that it became harder and harder to enjoy ourselves. In the end, if we made a precise calculation of how much we enjoyed compared to how much we were dissatisfied and suffering in one way or another, we would find the scales tilted heavily to “dissatisfied and suffering.”
We deceived ourselves that we were doing well. What was so positive about our old world? Did anything we do leave us with a sense of lasting happiness and joy? Also, whether we were ordinary people just trying to get by and serve our families, or people who strove for more wealth, respect, power and knowledge—we would all merely ever experience momentary fulfillment, only to be left empty again needing to once again seek more fulfillment.
Ultimately, we were all equal in the way we lived our lives: We were in a perpetual chase after enjoyment that always slipped through our fingers the moment we started contacting it.
The Coronavirus Washes Away Egoistic Waste and Gives Us Room to Create a Better World
Therefore, now we have entered a cleansing period that is washing away the egoistic, competitive and socially divisive waste that was accruing. As we were filling our oceans with plastic and radioactive waste, so we were making a mess of human society.
At this juncture, our best move would be to build a new and much more positive world.
The coronavirus and all its consequent social distancing conditions around the world has given us time and room to contemplate on how we were driving our past egoistic society to ruin. Moreover, if we would compare the current coronavirus to past pandemics, then we would see that the amount of deaths is relatively small. That is, nature has brought about this opportunity for a positive transformation with relative mercy and gentleness.
Therefore, we would be unwise if we returned to our old world of 10-to-12 hour work days, with big chunks of those days spent in traffic jams, multiple crises on personal, social and ecological scales, as well as perpetually-increasing debt.
Our optimal use of this transitional era is to help each other take a step forward into a new world: to think about how we can repair our relationships, rise above any differences we had, and implement new relations of mutual consideration and responsibility among human society.
I thus hope that when the social distancing conditions are lifted and the coronavirus era comes to an end, then we will also continue along a line that we now start: one where we value positive human connections that benefit the whole of humanity over any self-serving goals. Doing so would ensure our balance with nature, reveal a new world of happiness and confidence for everyone, and protect us from any further harm that we would bring upon ourselves.