The year 2020

Much has been written about the year 2020- an year filled with devastating tales and mind numbing realities. An invisible enemy, a novel virus unleashed upon us death and destruction and changed the course of our lives. The enemy did not directly come after our wealth or our power hierarchy but it came after the root of our existence- our social & collective spirit. Wealth & power were only the collateral damages that we incurred. As humans, the one thing that is core to our progress is social intermingling and the virus took it away without even sounding the war bugle. Social intermingling gave rise to its ugly alter ego- social distancing.

This has been the year where we genuinely experienced the oft used term of “information overload” so much so that it has become nearly impossible to distinguish information from noise. This year made us experience human emotion as mere information because we couldn’t be near one another. The losing of a loved one, a relative, a friend, a celebrity, and the nameless man on the street have all been reduced to one message on WhatsApp being forwarded thousands of times because we couldn’t leave our houses, couldn’t grieve looking at our phone screens and did not know what else to do. The number of deaths and the virus case load tickers on news channels ran just like the stock market ones. Both soared at the same time to all-time highs. We did not know how to experience this emotion.

More than 1.7 million people disappeared from the face of the earth this year owing to just one novel disease caused by the virus. At its peak in May 2020, the virus had made it difficult to make ends meet for 1.7 billion of the world’s workforce. Even in December 2020, hundreds of millions of people globally have been put out of work simply because there are no opportunities that once existed. We can only imagine the chilling effects of these numbers and the devastation that these effects would bring on the billions of people-the immediate family members dependent on these workers.

As I write this, I cannot possibly undermine the privilege of having had a job and a steady income throughout this year which made me less prone to the virus, less affected by the disaster unfolding all around me. Having cocooned in a shell of relative privilege, this year has made me reflect on things in sharp contrast.

Where do we go from here?

Although we have extremely heartening news of the vaccine roll out in certain countries, the end of this dark tunnel is still quite far away, especially for people in the low and middle income countries. Social distancing giving way to social intermingling again is still debatable. Having adopted remote communication and remote work to make do with social intermingling, as people and as organisations we have lost that human spark. How soon can we meet people in person, share, laugh, cry and celebrate without masks and standard operating procedures is a question that still needs answers to.

Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists

This year I read Raghuram Rajan’s famous book which brilliantly highlights the raging disparities that the ills of capitalism have created. Rajan writes- “Government, even in a democracy, can be captured by a small well organised class that has little interest in seeing broad-based access to finance”. If I could extrapolate, this small organised class is against equitable distribution of wealth and wants concentration of it thus creating deep economic imbalances. Owing to the pressure of the pandemic, governments across the world have borrowed money, devalued their currencies, essentially robbing the future generations to pay for the present. But this kind of a Ponzi scheme will keep hitting us hard over and over again.  People will start moving away from traditional assets and look for creating a newer world order once the trust starts eroding. As investor and philosopher Naval Ravikant Tweeted - "It is not so much bitcoin going up as dollar going down"

What does it mean to remain in uncertainty?

Our parent’s generation (the baby boomers) had more or less one large geopolitical uncertainty to deal with- the cold war. The levers to that war were held by humans and it could be controlled. To put it in a blind spot matrix, it was known known scenario and was easier to deal with. 2 actors (US & the Soviet Union) both with nuclear capability acting rationally would lead to the outcome of maintaining status quo. Cut to 2020, the information age has moved us to the far end of the matrix of unknown unknowns. The next warfare isn’t going to be nuclear, because the origins and the outcomes of which are known. The next warfare is going to be information and chemical/biological warfare where it is impossible to definitely pinpoint to the origins or the outcomes. These have both the seen and the unseen effects, to borrow from Amit Varma’s famous podcast. Often, the unseen effects far outweigh the seen effects. We are already the foot soldiers of the information warfare unleashed upon us through fake and asymmetrical news propaganda and this year we have all now entered the era of a biological one.

For the foreseeable future, we will remain in the state of unknown unknowns. The next big human invention, I believe would be to devise a cyber mechanism which can analyse humungous amounts of data for us to toggle between the state of unknown unknowns to the state of known knowns where it is easier to predict, control and restore. Much of the work in this is already happening and what it needs is state capacity, scale and the global acceptance. 

Optimising outcomes in uncertainty

Many of the post-doctoral scholars have looked at optimising decision making amidst uncertainty from a theoretical standpoint. What I have often wondered is amidst the daily hustle, how do we inculcate the mind set of optimising for the best outcome?  In an environment of uncertainty what is it that we hold on to? In this I always tend to go back to my residential school days where we chanted the Bhagavad Gita before every meal.  The Gita says, one should choose the right thing to do- Karma and keep doing it till its perfection. And that is all one can control- his/her own Karma and not its outcome. My intention is not to offer a philosophical answer to a practical question staring at us, but is to drive home a straightforward point. We can optimise the outcomes when we deliver 100% on the factors that we can control- our work, our relationships, our responsibilities and stop fretting on the factors which we cannot control- the next pandemic, the next recession, the next stock market crash.

The year 2020 has been a year where a lot of things happened, without much happening.