Covid-19: Priorities changing from Me to We…

One thing that I noticed is that the Covid-19 pandemic shook us out of our usual “me, me, me” paradigm. This virus spreading beyond boundaries, regardless of nationality, culture, social status made us more aware of our inevitable interconnections.

We are watching each other, we almost feel the virus spreading among us. It is not enough that we are afraid we might catch the virus if we go closer than 2 meters towards others, we are now also feeling responsibility towards the same people since we cannot be certain it is not us who are spreading it.

Then we have the same problem with shopping. We can’t buy what we want, the amount we want, we need to be considerate and most supermarkets limit how many people can go in and how much we can purchase. It is a very sharp sensation that we do not exist on our own anymore, we do not live in a bubble where seemingly I can do whatever I want, but I am constantly bumping into others and everything has become mutual, collective.

At the moment this mutual interdependence, mutual responsibility is mostly negative, we do not like it. We feel as if we lost our freedom!

What we do not understand that it has always been the same. We were always totally influenced by others, by the values, customs, bandwagons, soaking in the “viral” information spreading, buying, desiring what others buy, desire. We have always been the product of the environment we live in. But we were simply manipulated in a way that we still believed in imaginary personal independence, freedom.

Now, this illusion is gone, finding ourselves chained to each other.

On the other hand, we could turn this negative sensation upside down. For example, we are also experiencing increased mutual sympathy, even cooperation, mutual support during the pandemic, especially in the harder hit nations. And slowly, gradually — especially seeing the desperately helpless, inadequate, uncoordinated efforts, reactions from the governments, leaders of most countries — we also started to sense that in a world where we depend on each other so much, only positive, mutually responsible and mutually complementing connections, cooperation can offer solutions for our collective, global problems.

This way or that way our priorities will change from “me to we”, as either by experience through suffering, or by the right education helping us consciously and faster, we will understand that in the globally integrated and fully interdependent world we evolved into — and can’t escape from — individual health, survival, prosperity, and success is intimately intertwined with the health, survival, prosperity, and success of the whole collective.