Page 179 - COVID-19: The Great Reset

of our beliefs and convictions. This could result in a shift in our
priorities that would in turn affect our approach to many aspects of

our everyday lives: how we socialize, take care of our family
members and friends, exercise, manage our health, shop,
educate our children, and even how we see our position in the
world. Increasingly, obvious questions may come to the fore, like:

Do we know what is important? Are we too selfish and
overfocused on ourselves? Do we give too great a priority and
excessive time to our career? Are we slaves to consumerism? In
the post-pandemic era, thanks to the pause for thought it offered

some of us, our responses may well have evolved as compared to
what our pre-pandemic selves might have answered.

Let us consider, in an arbitrary and non-exclusive fashion,
some of these potential changes whose likelihood of occurrence,
it seems to us, even if not very high, is nonetheless greater than

commonly assumed.

3.3.1. Creativity

It may be a cliché to say that “what doesn’t kill us makes us

stronger”, but Friedrich Nietzsche had a point. Not everybody who
survives a pandemic emerges from it stronger, far from it.
However, a few individuals do, with actions and achievements that
may sound marginal at the time but with hindsight are seen to
have made a tremendous impact. Being creatively minded helps.

So does being in the right place (like the right industry) at the right
time. There is little doubt, for example, that in the next few years
we will witness an explosion of creativity among start-ups and new

ventures in the digital and biotechnological spaces. The pandemic
has blown following winds into the sails of both, suggesting that
we will see a good deal of progress and much innovation on the
part of the most creative and original individuals in these sectors.
The most gifted entrepreneurs will have a field day!

The same may well happen in the realms of science and the
arts. Illustrious past episodes corroborate that creative characters
thrive in lockdown. Isaac Newton, for one, flourished during the
plague. When Cambridge University had to shut down in the

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