It’s a bit difficult to capture all my thoughts on the topic here (I’m working on another essay on the topic) but a few thoughts:
- the relative stability we’ve enjoyed over the past 7 decades in west (particularly in US) has meant that increasingly few people have experienced... https://twitter.com/leepnet/status/1282786538200248320

...anything approaching a cataclysmic event in their lives (a la WWII)
- further, we are at least a century removed from the type of rapid acceleration in tech (a la IR) that causes massive social upheaval and reorienting of society. I think we are at dawn of that era

- accordingly, we lack the muscle memory to respond in those truly disruptive moments. We view historical change as progressing linearly when it can have episodic logarithmic shifts. Future of work, climate change both represent those types of shocks.

- government and society haven’t incentivized building the type of resilience in individuals (eg, encouraging saving, lifelong learning, art/creation as therapy, community support); it’s been far more focused on individuality and mass consumption...

- Thus I fear we have built a society where many peoples’ reactions to change is/will be “flooded response” to borrow the term from a parenting book “The Soul of Discipline”

- in past, religion provided some source of resilience, comfort, community to individuals; in an increasingly secular and isolated society, people need another outlet to enable them to build resilience and find community...

- This is one reason I see the mental health profession as the most important profession of the C21st and in online communities which are encouraging URL to IRL (see eg @whatstheii, @mcjpod)

- Since I see governments having increasing difficult taking care of their own citizens, we need to encourage smaller communities and individuals themselves to make basic investments in their individuals resilience

- we also need to decouple identity from place and profession. Need to get individuals comfortable with notion that they are likely to have multiple careers in their long lives; that despite our (hopefully) best efforts, places we loved as kids are likely to disappear ...

...bc of climate change; people need to realize change in next few decades (and beyond) will not be linear. But we can still thrive by being kind to ourselves and one another, by building purposeful, people center communities that look out for one another, etc (end)