Fear, Change, and the Unknown in the time of COVID-19

Why fear doesn’t keep you safe, and what to look towards instead

Unless you’ve been living under a rock (and in fairness, that might be as safe a place to self-quarantine as any), chances are the past couple of months have felt like a rollercoaster. Your emotional state has probably gone up and down at the drop of a tweet from optimism to pessimism and from thinking this will all be over in a few weeks to wondering if you will be around to play a role in our impending post-apocalyptic society.

Yet the one thing every prediction has in common, ranging from a quick resolution to a worldwide economic and societal collapse, is that it’s made up based on a limited data-set. No matter how many facts and figures the predictor has, the one thing that no amount of data allows us to take into account is the fact that the future is always an incomplete equation. We simply can’t take into account that which has not yet been thought of or discovered.

As a semi-public figure, I’ve had a fair number of people reaching out to me with questions about how best to navigate the unknown during the current COVID-19 crisis. While the questions range from how best to handle business problems to coping with illness and loss, the essential question behind the question is simply this: