Byproducts of Crises

When a certain disaster or calamity happens, we work towards ensuring that the same calamity can be dealt with in the better way, the next time it happens. The pain or loss that we suffer motivates us to do so.

We forget in our preparation and resource allocation to the ‘last’ disaster, that we have neglected many other things that are more likely to happen.

• Life has a tendency to surprise us, and we will be most likely smacked with something totally unforeseen and unrelated to the last disaster, that one was prepared for.
• A better strategy is to realize that it is inevitable that life will hit us unexpectedly, and to grow and learn from the same.
• Being adaptive, flexible and resilient would increase our adversity quotient, making us strengthen our inner resources, and enrich our experience.

The available research on the topic mostly shows us that, when faced with a disaster, people tend to be more caring and more concerned about the ones around them. 

Different forms of selflessness are easily reachable by individuals during natural disasters.

While technology may enable us today to stay connected with our friends, families as well as to keep working, it does not bring us the key to solidarity. 

The issue emerges whenever there are long periods of time that require social distancing, as individuals are forced to stay away from their group of friends or families. In order to still remain socially active, one might want to consider becoming more involved in the local community's activities.

Compounding is exponential growth. We tend to see the immediate linear relationships in the situation, e.g., how one test diagnoses one person.

The compounding effect of that relationship means that increased testing can lead to an exponential decrease in disease transmission because one infected person can infect more than just one person.

In the absence of enough testing, we need to use probabilistic thinking to make decisions on what actions to take. Reasonable probability will impact your approach to physical distancing if you estimate the likelihood of transmission as being three people out of ten instead of one person out of one thousand.

When you have to make decisions with incomplete information, use inversion: Look at the problem backward. Ask yourself what you could do to make things worse, then avoid doing those things.

Social isolation may be the leading problem of our era.

• 89% of people used a cell phone during their last social interaction. 82% felt it degraded the conversation.
• 40% of Americans identify as lonely; up from 1 in 10 in the 1970s.
• One in four Americans have no trusted confidante; up from 1 in 10 in 1985.
• Less than half of American kids live in a traditional family home.
• There’s been a 40% decline in standard measures of empathy since the 1990s.
• There’s been a 24% rise in suicides between 1999 and 2014.
• Only about half of Americans trust their neighbors.

Technology is part of the problem of disconnection, as we're replacing deep, emotion-driving in-person relationships with superficial online relationships.

Another cause is the decline of participation in organized religions that were traditionally responsible for weaving social fabric. Reweaving the social fabric is vital to the individual as well as collectively.

It means to be able to break down a big system into its sections and putting it back together. The target is to identify the strong and weak links: how the sections work, don’t work, or could potentially work and applying this knowledge to engineer useful outcomes.

There is no engineering method, so modular systems thinking varies with contexts.

• The ability to see a structure where there’s nothing apparent.
• Adeptness at designing under constraints.
• The capacity to hold alternative ideas in your head and make considered judgments.

• When automobile safety laws were introduced, the drivers started taking more risks while driving, leading to more pedestrian accidents.
• Children (and even adults) take more physical risks while playing a sport with protective gear.
• Safety features like Anti-lock brakes in vehicles ended up increasing the accidents for taxi drivers in Germany
• Child-proof caps on medicine bottles made parents careless about their being opened by kids, including the ones which don’t have the safety feature.

Having a safety device in place, and armed with the knowledge that we can push the envelope a bit, the appetite for risk increases.

• People who have an emergency fund in place tend to be less careful about their investments.
• People wearing a face-mask in this global pandemic feel like they are safer in crowded places (It’s a face mask, not an Iron Man suit).

Studying the natural disasters of the past, sociologists agree that while news reports lean towards the negative, a vast majority of people, good samaritans, doctors, nurses, government servants stay calm and help to the best of their abilities. While there can be panic and fear, caring for the other becomes common.

Economists and politicians often have views based on logical projection and past data, but human beings are an evolving race, and many assumptions now need to be overhauled.

A crisis helps draw awareness towards our fellow human beings, with our starting to embrace dependency, community, and solidarity, something not visible in normal circumstances.

Though we have to keep a physical distance in these strange times, we embrace each other more warmly.

Societies of the past and present are just complex systems comprising of people and technology.

Although we have better technologies, we are not immune to the threats that faced our ancestors. If anything, our technological abilities bring more challenges. Our globalized economic system may be more likely to cause a crisis to spread.

Although there is no conclusive explanation of why civilizations collapse, there are factors that can contribute.

• Climatic change can result in disaster, resulting in crop failure, starvation, and desertification. The Akkadians, the Mayan, the Roman Empire, and many others coincided with abrupt climatic changes.
• Ecological collapse theory: When societies overdo the carrying capacity of their environment, e.g., excessive deforestation, water pollution, soil degradation, and the loss of biodiversity.
• Inequality and oligarchy: As a population increases, the supply of labor outstrips demand, workers become cheap and society top-heavy. Political violence follows.
• Complexity: Accumulated complexity and bureaucracy eventually leads to collapse. The returns from complexity eventually reach a point of diminishing returns, causing collapse.
• External shocks: War, natural disasters, famine, and plagues. The Aztec Empire was brought to its knees by Spanish invaders. Early agrarian states were passing due to deadly epidemics.
• Randomness: Collapse is often random and independent of age.

• A social infrastructure: society needs a supply of creative innovators who are willing and able to challenge their physical environment in order to better themselves.
• Social incentives: there need to be incentives in place to encourage innovation.
• Social attitude: a creative society has to be diverse and tolerant. People must be open to new ideas and individuals.

“Invention occurs at the level of the individual, and we should address the factors that determine individual creativity. Individuals, however, do not live in a vacuum. What makes them implement, improve and adapt new technologies, or just devise small improvements in the way they carry out their daily work depends on the institutions and the attitudes around them.”

The key to working from home is clear communication with your boss. Your manager might not be used to managing people virtually or may not have a ready-to-go suite of tools for remote workers.

To prevent a breakdown in communication, you need to know exactly what's expected of you from day-to-day. Ask your boss for a 10-minute video call to start and end the day. Reach out to coworkers and managers regularly so that you won't get forgotten.

• Don't lounge around in your pajamas. Treat it like a real job.
• Create a space exclusively for work that is removed from distractions, just like you would at your office desk.
• Create boundaries within your home that your family members understand when you're 'at work.'
• Bookend your day. If you can't enter and leave a physical office that creates more precise boundaries, use psychological transitions like a 20-minute coffee in the morning, then exercise right after work.