In Part I, I discussed why this is hard. Today, I want to address this from the perspective of elements of your wealth where the difficulties are becoming evident. Wealth to me is having the freedom to enjoy your money, experiences, relationships, and time the way you want to.
Time keeps on ticking, but who called timeout?
The Coronavirus has made life feel like a Ferris Wheel. It takes forever to get off because you can only get off at the bottom and you wait for everyone else to get off and you sit there...and wait.
There is a lot of neuroscience for why there is so much anxiety. The reason time is dragging has as much to do with (a) we are experiencing something new - think of kids, and (b) we are grieving the loss of our definition of normal.
Relationships are interesting given the stay-at-home orders than many are living. Domestic violence is up here. Divorce is up in China. We are all a little too close to the ones we should want to be closest too. However, I have had some other interesting observations.
Who are the children? Who are the adults?
Parents are doing their best to still work from home and teach from home simultaneously. The spectrum of approaches range from laissez-faire to gung-ho.
The consequences are part of this implicit crisis. Our kids thrive on structure, freedom, cadence, and chemistry. We depended on teachers for this academic framework. Without it, I see kids having to live like adults, while simultaneously I see adults acting like kids.
There are unattractive components of adulting such as taking care of yourself (the gym, your diet, work, cleaning, taxes). Parenting is just another element to adulting and with all activities “outsourced” to parents - every teacher, every Tae Kwon Do instructor, every church youth group, is essentially giving parents “homework” on top of their normal responsibilities. We used to be Uber to get our kids to their activities. Now we are planning, preparing, executing, and evaluating our kids...non-stop. Simultaneously, we are co-mingling our personal and professional lives with no natural breaks on our calendars.
It can seem as hopeless as Jimmy Carter getting re-elected. It’s easier to defer responsibility, and many do. The unfortunate part is that people are passing this on to their kids. The kids then have no role models for how to “adult” - thus extending adolescence not just on the front end, but the back end as well. Virtues are dismissed.
When you have an overwhelming life rather than a simple, essential life - your task list becomes another source of anxiety and everyone is adding to your list.
Responsibility should be more rewarding than freedom. Freedom is superficially glamorous, but ultimately unfulfilling. It’s like a trip to Sweet Frog. You can feast on a buffet of overpriced yogurt and sugary toppings, but it’s a bunch of empty calories that you don’t really need.
Our unprecedented, yet fragile, prosperity has a consequence: the generation coming of age is stuck in a hazy, extended adolescence, never allowed simply to be children, and yet also rarely nudged to be fully adult. When I was 16, I was mowing yards and working at Disney. I rarely see kids performing tasks or working these days. Now these generations are facing a crisis and looking to each other to lead...not good.
We rationalize and embrace degeneracy and avoid growing up. Our “adulting” culture worships happiness over fulfillment - kids age fast and adults mature slowly.
Good adulting offers the ultimate wealth to others - structure to succeed, the freedom to pursue a vocation, the wealth to nurture your community, and the wisdom to raise the next generation.
A life well-lived demands we lean in to responsibility. We should drop the freedom from mindset and welcome the freedom to learn, the freedom to work, and the freedom to tackle meaningful challenges. Otherwise, coming-of-age Americans will float without direction, drifting like a rudderless sailboat. It’s limiting challenges rather than challenging limits.
In the end, until we can restore a true childhood, we will feed a culture of adultish children and childish adults.
Navigating Facts, Truths, and Outcomes regarding our health, our government, the media, and our economy
As I continue to read about the backdrop to the simultaneous and polarizing dilemmas between the economy and the pandemic, I have come to the conclusion than the science is scarier than the math, but the government is scarier than the science.
Equally as conflicting is that if the Coronavirus is as dangerous as they said, then we can’t lift the lockdown until we have achieved herd immunity. But we can’t achieve herd immunity until we lift the lockdown.
I tried to model where this conflict is coming from. My first model was to see all the different perspectives that reside in our current world view. I posted this picture. Quick! Which number represents your views one month ago, two weeks ago, and today?
The second model was to try to understand where the gaps were in those different perspectives.
These models heightened my awareness and understanding of different views and appreciate where those degrees of difference exist. As George Carlin once said talking about state license plates. “Some people are like New Hampshire - Live Free or Die. Others are like Idaho - Famous Potatoes. I would like to think I’m somewhere in between.”
Money
Try this exercise. Look at your credit card spend from 3/15 to 4/15 for 2019, then repeat that for 2020. Our family spending is down 31%. Multiply your reduction in spending by 128 Million Households, and you’ll get the idea of the impact on the economy and thus experiences.
Summary
Covid-19 has impacted our wealth. It has impacted our money, our experiences, our relationships, and our time.
The impact to our lives has been something unthinkable six months ago.
The math on cases, deaths, and growth rates has been scary. The science on asymptomatic carriers and how contagious it has been has been scarier. The only thing that has “trumped” that has been the reaction of our government. We are clearly not all rowing together.
This impact on our wealth and our ability to live the way we envision wealth is beyond frustrating. Wealth is typically about trade-offs like time and money. During this transition to a new normal, all elements of wealth feel weakened. Now we must hope that the we can recognize when the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t just another freight train, but an actual path for our wealth to grow again