Member-only story
What This Insane Year Is Trying To Teach Us
Long-term planning is a luxury we, as a species, no longer possess.
England has just announced a second lockdown for a month. Again. This ruined a bunch of my plans. Again.
Only this time, it got me thinking.
It’s impossible to make any long-term plans anymore.
Yes, the COVID outbreak will (hopefully) pass soon — humans are smart; they will come up with a vaccine or something else to fight this beast — but for some reason, it feels as if this tendency to rely on short-term planning will prevail.
Don’t get me wrong — this year was the worst. And it’s not my job here to add more panic. But the truth is, it’s not about the coronavirus. It’s about the general tendency about which the authors of Years and Years drama series were terrifyingly right.
We’re moving towards a breaking point, a crisis of humanity, when many different problems collide into one big shitstorm.
In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, such crises were usually productive — they pointed the human race towards the right course of action, giving them no choice except one. Humanity, in Asimov’s…
