Making Sense of 2020  Here We Are: 5 Stories That Got Us To Now

Jul 16, 2020 by Morgan Housel

Three days after Ronald Reagan was inaugurated in 1981, New York City Council President Carol Bellamy joined a group of speakers at a luncheon to discuss the country’s future.

The group tried to make sense of a world that was hardly recognizable from a generation before. Crime, inflation, and unemployment were surging. Speakers offered visions of what might happen next.

Bellamy said they were all misguided.

No one was discussing “where we’ve been, and until we know that, it’s difficult to figure out where we’re heading,” she said, according to the New York Times.

This article is about how that idea applies to 2020.

Everyone is innocently short-sighted when trying to make sense of 2020.

January, before Covid-19 upended everything, feels like a different lifetime. March is already a blur. Time slows when you experience surprise, and every day of 2020 brings a new shock. So the recent past feels like distant history.

But if you survey the confusing mess we’re in – 50 million jobs lost, 130,000 dead, Tesla stock up 400% – you have to remember that none of it happened in a vacuum. Every event has parents, grandparents, siblings, and cousins – previous events that planted the seeds, passed on their DNA, and continue to influence what’s happening today.

To have any hope of making sense of what’s happening in 2020, we have to pay attention to a bunch of seemingly unrelated stories that began before anyone had heard of Covid-19.

Here are five that seem particularly important.

1. People grew apart financially at the same time they became connected digitally, which exacerbates tribal instincts and exposes you to people who don’t see the world as you do, who become easy targets for criticism and blame.

To understand why so many people are so angry in 2020 you have to realize that half the country gained insight into the other half at the very moment those halves were as different economically as they’ve ever been.

Here’s one side of the equation:

To continue reading, please go to the original article here:

https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/here-we-are-5-stories-that-got-us-to-now/