The Post-COVID-19 Story You Need To Write Tomorrow
To shape a new collective narrative, we must let go of our old stories first.
The stories we tell — each other, the world, ourselves — are powerful.
Neuroscientists have pointed to a truly wondrous interplay of three chemical reactions to explain why we’re hooked by stories. When the release of cortisol caused by something that grabs our attention mixes with the release of oxytocin (caused by us relating to and caring for someone else, by even just imagining that we’re close to a person or a fictitious character), we experience a phenomenon called “transportation.” We are then inextricably linked to the character’s fate, and if the story has a happy ending, it prompts our limbic system, the brain’s reward center, to release dopamine. “Stories are told in the body,” as the author Jeremy Adam Smith sums it up, they punch us in the guts.
We are indeed “storytelling animals,” Jonathan Gottschall argues in his book of the same name. It is human’s innate ability to tell stories that has helped us adapt to changing environments — and survive whenever we were confronted with unexpected, inexplicable events.
Like the COVID-19 pandemic.
A blank slate
The need for telling stories is particularly acute right now. The current crisis has cracked holes in some of our most persistent narratives, from the grand societal constructions such as capitalism or democracy to the more personal ones such as freedom, individualism, self-actualization, romantic love, and the idea of a progressive career, to the complicated stories of our relationships. Some of us discover that we are much more shaped by our work than we had thought, others realize that work is far less important to them than they had believed. Some may discover that they’ve been living in a lie, others that their truth is not good enough. And the pandemic has tarnished some of the soft power classics, for example the American Dream: what already used to be a farce before COVID-19, is now becoming a tragedy, to borrow from Marx’s famous adage.
Justin EH Smith, a professor of history and philosophy at the University of Paris, considers this a tabula rasa moment: “Any fashion, sensibility, ideology, set of priorities, worldview or hobby that you acquired prior to March 2020, and that may have by then started to seem to you cumbersome, dull, inauthentic, a drag: you are no longer beholden to it,” he writes. “You can cast it off entirely and no one will care; likely, no one will notice.”
The world’s biggest ever writing exercise
With everything suspended and upended, now more than ever do we need new stories to fill the voids that have formed at the personal, organizational, and societal level — and there is no lack of effort. The storytelling animals that we are have sprung into action.
Ever the since the beginning of the outbreak, from the accounts of Wuhan residents (like that of journalist Yuli Yang) to the plight of healthcare workers on the frontline to the tales of loneliness in self-isolation and other forms of documenting the impact on our lives, on traditional media or social media or simply for our own sake by journaling, we have found ourselves in the world’s biggest ever collective writing exercise. We are trying to find words again after we were forced to come to our senses.
Many friends of mine have told me that they are writing more these days, or have begun to write if they didn’t already, in a desperate effort to understand what is happening and why. In the face of the cognitive and emotional overload that the pandemic represents, writing is cathartic. We adjust by writing new stories, every day, and then living up to them, or we adjust and then write about it.
At the organizational level, nonprofits, companies, educational and art institutions are harkening back to their foundational story, to the founder’s vision or collective myth that gave them the reason to exist in the first place. In other words, they’re rediscovering and doubling down on their purpose, using it as a filter to discern and act on what truly matters. The National Head Start Association, for example, the advocacy group behind the U.S. Head Start program, the government-funded early childhood education program for low-income children and their families, moved its annual conference fully online, reminding itself and its community that resilience had always been its beating heart ever since it was founded under President Lyndon B. Johnson more than 50 years ago. Slush, a tech innovation conference in Helsinki, decided to cancel its annual event and to instead redirect its resources to providing flailing startups with in-kind support. The learning platform Coursera offered all universities in the world impacted by COVID-19 free access to their catalogue of 3,800 courses via Coursera for Campus, a platform that enables institutions to create online programs for students.
Shaping a new collective narrative
At the societal level, the ambition is even grander: it is to find a new collective purpose, using the crisis as the great reset to strengthen the idea of our shared humanity, to dream bigger and shape the future by writing it.
There are good reasons for considering the pandemic a landmark moment that calls for a new narrative. One is astrological. Astrologists predicted that 2020 was going to be momentous, as Pluto and Saturn were aligning in Capricorn for the first time in 500 years — a moment of rupture that had historically marked major global change. Last observed in 1982, the conjunction of Pluto and Saturn is extremely rare, and it coincided with some historically significant events, such as the start of the first world war, the second world war, the cultural revolution of the 1960s, and the recession of the 1980s.
What is different from all these previous ruptures is that never before in modern history did we face one common enemy. Further, the pain from the COVID-19 disruption has become so strong that there can’t be a return to normal. The newly launched World Hope Forum believes that the crisis offers “a blank page for a new beginning,” and the German magazine Der Spiegel’s title story this week is “The Departure.”
Likewise, the nonprofit organization More in Common considers this moment a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for crafting a new collective narrative. Surveying citizens in Western democracies such as the US, UK, France, or Germany, the organization found that the number one antidote to the growing polarization of our societies would be an aspirational project, a common vision of the future, a new story for our shared humanity.
Losing ourselves in the story
The House of Beautiful Business, the think tank and community I co-founded, is delighted to partner with More in Common and The New Constellation Project for a virtual Living Room Session to do just that: together we are poised to write “The New Collective Narrative” and literally put words on paper.
However, as we were designing the session with Gemma Mortensen, co-founder of The New Constellation Project, and Mathieu Lefevre, co-founder and CEO of More in Common, we quickly faced more questions than answers: Which outcomes should we hope and push for? Did it make sense to write a new story without knowing the end of the previous one? And what if COVID-19 is a never-ending story, both in the sense that it may be with us for the rest of our lives and that its meaning will forever be mysterious? What if it is writing us and not the other way around?
Soon we realized, that we, too, had to let go of our stories, that we had change our mental patterns, that the typical input-outcome, results-oriented construction we were so used to did not cut it this time, in this time. Gemma and Mathieu prompted us gently to rethink our original idea of running break-out groups and giving participants templates, tools, and instructions that would help them arrive at a coherent story within just 30 minutes. Instead, they suggested, we should all just think and write together, each of us for themselves, silently turned inward, and then share our deeply personal words and images with each other without the need to come up with a proper ending, without the need to force it all into a container, into one singular narrative.
It was a moment of relief. Just as the pandemic had suspended and liberated us from our old stories, Gemma and Mathieu liberated us from the pressure to produce. The new stories did indeed need more time to develop. Instead of driving to conclusions, we realized we had to lose ourselves in a stream of consciousness first and immerse ourselves in disjointed moments rather than look for coherent meaning. Instead of finding the morale of the story, we had to find encouragement in words. Instead of considering it a puzzle that needs to be solved, we had to treat this crisis like a mystery that needs to be cherished.
In the final sequence of Wong-Kar Wai’s film In the Mood for Love, the male protagonist writes something on a sheet of a paper, perhaps a love letter, a poem, or a farewell note, who knows what, and then he folds it and puts it in a tree hole that he covers with mud. The end of the story, forever unknown.
As we face the great unknown, a whole new world, a whole new constellation, we should trust our intuition instead of retreating to knowledge. Before we make sense, we must sense. So that tomorrow, if we’re lucky, whatever we’ll write will just be the beginning of the story.
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Join us for the Living Room Session on “The New Collective Narrative” and sign up for free here!
Living Room Sessions are part of a Residency at the House of Beautiful Business, a global think tank and community with the mission to make humans more humans and business more beautiful. In response to the global coronavirus crisis, we’ve opened up Living Room Sessions to the public until the end of April. View all upcoming Living Room Sessions and sign up for free.
Tim Leberecht is the co-founder of The Business Romantic Society and a co-curator of the House of Beautiful Business.
The Journal of Beautiful Business is a production of The Business Romantic Society, hosts of the House of Beautiful Business.
The House can be found on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and Instagram, and in Lisbon, Portugal from October 31– November 3, 2020. Please apply for House Residency here.
