The inconvenience of a crisis

In an alternate reality, Anirudh (Version 193463882…) has probably completed 10 different online certifications during the pandemic, this Anirudh (the original one of course) however, just completed one.

Somewhere in the vortex of time between 2020 and 2021, I took a Systems Thinking course. In my mind you’re either an online course person or you’re not and I was squarely in the latter camp having started a multitude of these cursed Coursera courses and either, never getting past the first few lessons or completing them and thinking I could’ve spent that time on something else. This time it was different. Possibly because it was about a subject that spoke to my areas of interest — epistemology, behavioural change, thought concepts and models rather than on a subject that I thought ‘would be cool to check out’ — the highly refined decision-making framework I had used for registering for previous courses.

One concept rings very clearly to this day for me from that course and it was the need to define a system not necessarily as the sum of the individual ‘nodes’, but as the sum of the relationships between those ‘nodes’. That may not sound like too much of a revelation, but a light bulb lit up in my mind the minute I read that. It was one of those Eureka moments where I just paused the video and stared at the neighbour’s cat in the window across the street.

It was a subtle difference, but one that made me reconsider how I value objects, people and the relationships I have with them. I started to analyse my relationship with every inanimate object in the room. I scanned the room and my eyes fell to the familiar sky blue Covid mask on my desk. What was my relationship with this dreadful thing? Was it just an everyday accessory if I had to go out — no more than important than my wallet or phone? Or was it just a reminder of the dystopia we live in? The headspace occupied by the ‘image of the mask’, in my mind was directly linked to the value I placed on the object. On this point, let me just say, that unfortunately there was no immediate feeling of altruism. If I was being honest with myself (and with you dear reader), the primary value of that mask for me did not stem from a need to protect others, but to protect myself and to ensure that I could for example — walk into the bakery for a croissant (The Dutch really do croissants well… understated masters of bread) or use public transport without being kicked off the tram.

As someone working in the climate sector, this has stark implications. Could the reason an individual and by extension, society feels disconnected with systemic challenges and concepts (climate change, biodiversity loss, plastic pollution, the pandemic, personal health, compound interest… the list is endless) be fundamentally whittled down to the level of immediate inconvenience one is willing to bear?

For those of you who have stayed with me thus far, you may be asking — well what of the opposite side of this coin? What if we incentivized people to make a ‘good’ decision rather than increase the inconvenience of a ‘bad’ one? What if, unlike me, you don’t lack the capability to be altruistic? (Feel free to stop reading if you’re asking the last question, you’re a better person than I am)

In trying to condense a lifetime of events and experiences, we abstract and allegorize to a point where our own narrative ends up being a nugget of reality wrapped up in the yarn of imagination and truth. This is why we all love stories, because we are always able to find elements of ourselves within them to connect to — regardless of the quality. So, if an asset manager or the CEO of the world’s largest fund manager has a specific opinion — look to the narrative they have built for themselves. Their identity is defined by their perceived success within a given system. This is, in all fairness, completely understandable. If you or I were Larry Fink, we would say much of the same as he has because that philosophy is linked to his identity and that identity is linked to the narrative he’s built for himself.

This is very hard to change and, fortunately or unfortunately, we do not have the time to try.

Related posts:

I had been working with a simple comment form like above this week, and I challenged myself today to add title Mr./Ms., but it turned out more difficult than I imagined. I encountered with some bugs…

Hey! My name is Alex and I’m a recent graduate from futureproof’s Web Developer Bootcamp. This is the first blog posts I will be making where I will write about anything from myself and my…

The shock of the presidential debate is fresh in our minds. Most notably, how Trump refused to condemn white supremacy;- instead, gave an “order” to the far-right group the Proud Boys by instructing…