Covid-19: Can the frugal life we live through the lockdown become the new norm?

It is amazing how quickly we can adjust to a more “frugal” life when we have to. And if this “frugal” life stays with us for a while, we start to realize that it is actually more natural, healthier and easier to maintain.

What the virus has removed from our lives so far — after all the fulfillment of basic, natural, Human necessities have continued all over the world — is the unnatural excess we are usually brainwashed to “need”, to “want” as part of the artificial “aggregate demand” that keeps the excessive, overproduction and overconsumption socio-economic model we have built for ourselves.

And what those who want to return to the “old life” ASAP mercifully forget is the fact, that that old system was already on “life support” many years before the pandemic started. Our civilization has reached the dead-end all previous Human civilizations reach through the recurring, vicious historic cycles.

For a Human socio-economic system to become truly successful, sustainable we would need to learn and follow Nature’s fundamental laws governing the closed, fully integral, living systems we also live in.

Thus the answer to your question depends on how much we learn from the lessons of this “forced rehab”, how much we internalized, digested its message and how ready we are to change ourselves and the Human society we live through a unique, purposeful and methodical education.

If we do not prepare ourselves, then the moment the lockdown is over the previous incessant brainwashing through media, marketing and entertainment will restart and we will fall back into the previous, artificial, self-destructive routine without any free choice.