If Tomorrow Never Comes
Remember the ‘new normal’?
Isn’t it supposed to be here by now? Have you got it? I think I had it but I must have left it in my other trousers. Or maybe I dreamt it.
Like a recalcitrant set of car keys, the ‘new normal’ frustratingly refuses to make an appearance and leaves us stuck where we are.
Have you looked down the back of the sofa? Oh, Mark and Tim already checked there, although they are still convinced that’s where it is and they’re going to keep looking.
Elon is sure he’s got it and he’s going to build it at his Tesla plants, although it oddly looks like he’s recreating the 1980s. Or even the 1880s.
Are you sure it’s not here?
We’ve been waiting three years or more now, it’s GOT to be here soon …
(Pssst. Want to know the truth? We’ve been stood up. It’s not coming.)
Between Today And Yesterday
We understand the desire for some to return to the past and the comfort of what they know. We also see some are pushing forward for the opportunities they can see to create a different world from the past.
But most of us are stuck in the middle. Actually, we’re ALL stuck in the middle, in this liminal space. It’s just that a few have absolutely certainty about what direction to head in, whilst the rest of us are surrendering to the fact we are confused, anxious and uncertain.
We are ‘betwixt and between’, as anthropologist Melissa Fischer said in this week’s ‘Inspired People, Inspired Places’ Meetup in the metaverse that was asking “How are people really feeling?”. It was an exploration of how we are as we struggle with the fallout of the pandemic and it reminded me of liminality and the importance of feeling into our emotions.
In the edition no 23 of this missive (Oct 2021) I wrote:
Liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning "a threshold”) was first used in anthropology to describe the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete.
I realised I’d also come across it in William Bridges’ Model of Transition, which I often refer to. It’s the middle stage, the Neutral Zone, between The Ending & Letting Go and The New Beginning. It’s the period of fog and uncertainty (and often anguish and distress) that we go through as we figure out what to do next.
I’d covered this a year earlier in a LinkedIN article from May 2020, “Coping with this COVID-19 transition”, where I explained Bridges’ Model in more detail and how the pandemic had shoved us all through the first step, the Ending, and put us all in the liminal space of The Neutral Zone. As I put it back then,
“This is where we are right now. We are grieving for the life we had and we are mostly not yet accepting that the future will be different, that our old life has died. “
We’re still here. “..in limbo. In uncertainty, ambiguity and confusion.” And we’re going to be here a while yet, no matter how much we might wish away the discomfort of it all. In fact, denial will just keep us here longer (believe me, I know from personal experience).
The purpose of The Neutral Zone is to give us the space and time to process and integrate our experiences and the emotions that arise from it. In rites of passage, the disorientation is often deliberately created to enable this to happen, whether through taking hallucinogenic substances, enforced starvation or sensory deprivation (the first definitely gets my vote!).
For all of us, the pandemic has created the disorientation. We need to spend time reflecting upon that experience, what it meant to us, how it made us feel. How it is making us feel, as we deal with the fallout and the aftershocks. The losses we suffered and are suffering, the anchors of our past that have disappeared, the ways we have had to adapt or chosen to adapt. The grief that inevitably follows from these losses.
It’s human nature to want to move forward and to leave bad stuff in past but if we don’t properly process it, it doesn’t go away. It waits in the background and then comes back to bite our arse. We simply have to deal with what happened before we can move past it, to our New Beginnings, as Bridges calls the final stage.
That’s why this was a really important conversation and we need to have more of them.
It’s in all our interests to do so.
After The Gold Rush
At times, the pandemic seems a long time ago. Such an odd time, it feels like we must have dreamt it.
It was a collective trauma, the like of which we haven’t seen since the Second World War. That event shaped the world anew and we live in the architecture of the society that was built from the rubble. What is often forgotten in the story we tell is the decade of reconstruction. When the war ended, Europe was awash with hundreds of thousands of dislocated people, who had to try to rebuild their shattered lives and return to their homelands. It was chaotic, disordered, shambolic. Rebuilding efforts didn’t have impact for many years. It didn’t finish in 1945, the trauma continued for another decade.
That’s where we are right now, in the aftermath of the main event.
The pandemic was both an individual and collective trauma, with the two oddly disconnected. It was a deeply paradoxical time. When I was most physically restricted, only allowed out of my house for an hour a day, my digital world expanded beyond my expectations. I was making friends with people all over the world, building community with people I had no expectation of ever meeting in person.
As my real life world shrunk and we ended up watching repeats on TV and zooming with a small group of friends and family, I was uncovering whole worlds of knowledge I never knew existed, accessing a collective intelligence that would never have come about BUT for the pandemic. I experienced separation and connectedness at their extremes, at the same time. Both were novel experiences. Both were perhaps heightened by being experienced simultaneously.
I felt all this and I was used to working from home (or anywhere) and had been networking virtually for years. The impact on the majority who had never done these things, or even realised they were possible, but were now doing them as routine must have been even more mind-bending. Shock therapy, a sudden and startling immersion in a new world, at the same time as facing an existential crisis the like of which they had never seen. It was, and is, a ‘Big Deal’.
What the pandemic did for many was smash down the wall between ‘work’ and ‘life’. We realised they are one and the same thing and that the wall was, in fact, a figment of our imagination, a part of the ‘enchantment’ we had been drawn into. Even if we want to go back to the pre-existing ‘normal’, when we go there it’s not the same. The wall has a big hole in it, if any of it remains standing at all.
This throws up a whole bunch of new emotions. How could we have seen things the way we did? We might feel shame at our stupidity, grief at the time we lost, anger at those who misled us, betrayal by those who told us the ‘enchantment’ was real. Anger at the whole thing.
We’re going to be betwixt and between for a while yet, whilst we work through that lot.
Can’t Stop The Feeling
I don’t know what the ‘future of work’ will be like and anyone who says they do is a fool or a liar, no matter how rich and powerful they are.
I do know there won’t be ‘a’ future of work but a multiplicity of different outcomes, in the same way the past was a multiplicity of different arrangements that have subsequently been smushed into one through a biased retelling of the past by vested interests. The old normal was never the norm, it was just the dominant story.
I have my ideas about what I would like to see emerge, what I believe works best, what I believe would be good for people, planet, society and business. I certainly hope they feature in the more popular variants that emerge but I’m under no illusion that exploitative, extractive, abusive business models and work environments will disappear any time soon, or ever. Although I sincerely hope that they will become the minority.
A dimension of work that has been overlooked in the past, if not actively suppressed, is it’s emotional impact. This is about more than culture, this is what work gives to or demands from people at the individual level.
When I joined the workforce, the idea that work had an emotional cost would have been outlandish. Work was what enabled you to build a good life, put food on the table and a roof over your head. It contributed to your emotional wellbeing.
Since then, we have been encouraged to give more and more of ourselves to our work, without ever considering the cost. We have been groomed to push through our emotional pain, to numb ourselves to the stress and anxiety, to close our eyes to the moral injury. As a result, we have ignored our hurts and pushed ourselves beyond our natural limits, all as ‘part of the territory’ that goes with the job.
To many, the pandemic revealed to them that the boundaries had shifted too far, that the hurts had become too great, that the costs were no longer in line with the benefits. That it was unsustainable and they could change their arrangements to prioritise their physical and emotional needs. What we are seeing is a large scale readjustment.
The future of work will need to pay attention to the emotional landscape that it presents. It can no longer be shoved into the background, hidden behind fancy job titles, baubles of status and an emphasis on the protestant work ethic. It will now be front and central.
I hope that is one of the cornerstones of the new architecture we need to build post-pandemic.
Will We Talk?
My thoughts feel a little under-developed here, partly because I have been caught up in the trend to move past the pandemic and sucked into the false binaries of office v remote, fixed v hybrid, mandated days v fully flexible. It’s understandable but we need to go back and work through our life-altering experiences and emotions.
Whilst we have the language and the understanding to explore our emotions that we lacked in the post-war period, we also have the relentless pressure to move forward, the immediacy of social media and the superficiality of much of modern culture to distract us from the introspection and reflection we need to do.
When did you last think about this? When did you last ask someone how they were feeling about it?
It’s too important to ignore, we have to resist being pushed onwards. We have to find the time to do the work, go back and get messy.
If you’ve got any thoughts on this and want to explore this topic further, or if you’d like some help with your own reflection, get in touch and let’s discuss it further. Email me, DM me on LinkedIN, or just book a call at www.calendly.com/colinnewlyn/30mins