Measuring Economic Well-being

A therapist once told me I catastrophized everything. When something bad or unpleasant happens, my mind runs ahead to the worst-case scenario. Bad day at work? I'm going to be fired, never work again, be homeless and on the streets in the matter of a year. Bruce is late from work? Surely, he's been in a car accident. Probably is dead. I've got his funeral planned and am figuring out how I'll be able to make ends meet without him about the time he pulls in the driveway. The therapist, of course, thought this was a bad thing. I might be happier if I could learn to not assume the worst. To me though it's just good planning. Preparing myself for the inevitable bad things that will eventually come down the road. Because, in the midst of a pandemic, it's obvious that bad things do inevitably come down the road. 

The problem is that despite all the catastrophes I’ve been preparing for, a pandemic wasn't on my radar. It never is. I plan for conflicts to arise at meetings, getting my arguments and data all in a row. And then the thing that sets off the disagreement is something I never imagined people would have an issue with. Like why on earth when we can fight over raises, are we fighting over what color to paint the walls? 

There is no point to worrying, I realize that at some intellectual level. I can prepare all I want, but life is still going to throw me the zombie apocalypse when I'm planning for how to fix the Democratic party and save democracy. I really didn't see the zombies coming, but maybe they're all related. Democracies die all kinds of way, often because we either aren't reading or thinking, or maybe we're just eating each other’s brains. 

Even if I had been preparing for the pandemic, I still wouldn’t have had the imagination to think we’d be arguing about saving lives versus helping the economy. It would have felt like the choice between raises and paint colors.

Obviously, as a catastrophizer, I'm not one for seeing silver linings. To try to see the "bright" side of a pandemic is probably to be certifiably pathological. But then again, I'm an INTJ, the villains of the Myers Briggs Personality world, so maybe I'm the only one who can say it. Could an economic slowdown, a time out for humanity, have some positive impacts? Might it slow down climate change? Would it force us to change the way we view the economy and measure economic well-being? 

I wonder if this time could be used for changing our understanding of how economies, countries, and people actually live and work in the world. Could we possibly consider that an economy based on continual growth and consumption might not be possible? Could we maybe decide we'd like to measure economic well-being not on the Stock Market, the GDP, or a consumer price index, but rather on all people's and the planet's health, happiness, and well-being? Can we begin to understand that economic well-being cannot be measured in any meaningful way without including peoples’ health, our very survivability? We won’t have an economy if everyone is dead, so let’s get our priorities straight for once. This is our chance to do it.