We are globally burnt out and we need a global reset. How to create a global system of care?

I have a hypothesis about what we are seeing right now: students, faculty, everyone on the planet is exhausted of this pandemic. This absolute exhaustion is yielding poor outcomes on everything: low attendance, missed work, missed deadlines.

We are all burnt out, folks.

And herein lies the rub: we can’t individually self-care out of this rut. Somehow we need to engage in global collective action to create conditions that make our lives slower and gentler so we can recover from the global collective grief and loss that we’ve experienced.

We can’t “return to normal”. We need to create a new normal where risk assessment and policy choices are not individualized but the result of collective genuine care for one another.

We literally need a global transformation. We aren’t “returning to normal” because there isn’t one to return to.

The old normal was leading us down a spiral of collective burnout. This pandemic highlighted how poorly prepared our societies were and are for shocks of this magnitude. The old normal left us with many stressed individuals trying to cope with dwindling resources.

Terrible.

This new normal needs to create systemic conditions of care that value human lives across multiple groups. Otherwise we will just try to return to a system where we try to recreate the contexts that left us in this rut in the first place.

Time for a global transformation.

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