A few weeks ago, I had a good old rant on Facebook bemoaning all the buzzwords that I would prefer never to see again. Buzzword terms like unpack, disrupt, power couple, finger-on-the-pulse, go-getters. The list is inexhaustible. Not long after my posting this on social media, my sister gave me a call. She jokingly asks me if I was okay. Amazingly, unbelievably, she had never heard of the term unpack.
Now, to explain, I live and work in Johannesburg, which is probably the most go-getting city on the entire African continent. My sister on the other hand had moved to a small, quiet coastal town in Western Australia many years ago and now lives an enviable, small-town life.
In Johannesburg, our lives are busy, loud, stress-filled and overly ambitious. At least, it was until the CoronaVirus spread across the globe and changed everything. Never in my lifetime did I think I would be living in the middle of a post-apocalyptic dystopian novel, but here we are.
Bye, bye yesterday.
Amid all the daily news updates of global death and hospitalization, South Africa has been one of the few countries to see relatively low numbers of infection and death (at the time of writing our confirmed cases stands at 11,350 while our death rate is 206). South Africa’s lockdown started about six weeks ago and will continue for the foreseeable future, albeit lifting somewhat in various areas and industries.
Even though this pandemic, and its subsequent economic woes, has brought heartbreak and uncertainty to practically every part of the world, it is not without a silver-lining. In 1971 Roger Whittaker wrote “…and I can feel a new tomorrow coming on…” in a song called A New World in the Morning. If ever we were at the brink of a new world, it’s here and now.
For almost six years I have been hustling and bustling in this big, ambitious city of Johannesburg. My bookshelves were brimming with self-help books on how to be your own boss, how to prioritise your time better and how to find true happiness while being super successful. The trouble was, everyone was running the same race, applying the same tactics and trying to achieve the same things.
The corporate world with its toxic company culture had inadvertently given rise to a wave of new entrepreneurs, of which I was one. The lingo I had to learn and adopt was just another textbook full of industry jargon. Networking events had become the bane of my existence. It felt as if no matter where I turn, be it on Facebook or Wednesday morning’s ladies event, everybody was busy putting on a show. And that included me, too.
My acting was just as enthusiastic as the others’. My tolerance for this mass pretense, however, seems to have run dry and my appetite for our society’s obsession with self-indulgent boasting has evaporated.
Watching super-rich sports and entertainment personalities showing off their lifestyles has become nauseating in a time where average, everyday people are trying to make things better -and getting paid peanuts for their efforts. How disappointing will it be if after all of the sacrifices made during this pandemic, society goes back to the way things were?
Hello, New Tomorrow
We have a new world beckoning, and we are the ones who decide what this world will look like. Personally, I won’t be buying any tabloids or watching the lives of the rich and famous. I think we’ve done enough of that in the old world.
Go back in time to our yesterday when Marelise wrote this for us. Click here. Here is another one. Click here.
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