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There are a lot of memes and graphics floating around that talk about how, if you don’t come out of this global pandemic with a new skill, a new invention, a new body, a new something…that you will have wasted this time you’re sheltering in place.
A couple of days ago, I saw a graphic that listed all of the companies that didn’t exist before the Great Recession, including Venmo, Uber, Snapchat, Twitter, and more.
Yes…and.
The hustle mentality isn’t right for right now—and shaming people who don’t have the time (or don’t take the supposed extra time they have) to do something new is the absolute wrong thing to do.
That’s what we talk about on today’s Spin Sucks podcast episode.
The Hustle Mentality Amongst Grief
The Great Recession, the dot com bubble burst, and 9/11 have all happened in the last 20 years. All three were the same in some respects, but very different in others. Yes, they were the same in that unemployment was high, organizations went out of business, people were unable to pay their bills, and, particularly during 9/11, the country mourned.
But we didn’t also have the grief that we have today—and that’s what we’re all experiencing. Grief. Grief over the loss of proms and graduations. Loss of friends and routines. Loss of simple pleasures, such as meeting friends out for drinks or having birthday parties. We have grief over the loss of control of our lives and the loss of normalcy, the fear of economic toll, and the loss of connection.
What we feel is, what the experts call, “anticipatory grief.” This is the feeling we get about what the future holds when we’re uncertain. Usually it centers on death. We feel it when someone gets a dire diagnosis or when we have the normal thought that we’ll lose a parent someday.
Anticipatory grief is also more broadly about imagined futures. There is a storm coming. There’s something bad out there. With a virus, this kind of grief is confusing for all of us. Our primitive mind knows something bad is happening, but we can’t see it. This breaks our sense of safety and we feel that loss of safety.
To boot, we don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel. We’re smack dab in the middle of the tunnel and we don’t know how much further we have to keep digging.
We talk more about what that looks like, why it takes you longer to do anything now, and what to expect in the coming weeks and months.
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