21 Mai Predictions for life after the beginning of 2020

If our last article was about predictions of the 20th century for the 21st, after several internet reads it made sense to write this one: an article on today’s predictions for the near future, the world after the beginning of 2020.

This year, a sanitary crisis came into our lives, challenging our reality in all its dimensions. Until a vaccine is distributed to make us feel safe again, we wonder how life will be.

How can we deal with the changes? How will the future of our relations look like? Economically, professionally and personally speaking. 

One last question: does the co-living lifestyle still make sense in this new world?

Check our predictions, based on the opinions of many sources online and our own.

1.Economy like we have never seen before and an opportunity for reinvention

We have been living in a  world of globalisation and  this crisis is showing us how the economy depends on our interlaced relations with other nations and on our physical interaction. According to the trend forecaster Li Edelkoort in a interview for Dezzen magazine, the coronavirus epidemic will lead to “a global recession of a magnitude that has not been experienced before” and she believes that although its impact can be very negative it also opens an opportunity for humanity to reset its values.

What is now certain is the future is certainly uncertain and that our normal economy is probably never coming back, neither the way we have been trading and moving across countries. 

As humans, we must remain positive and find new ways to keep those economic relations flowing, by resetting our values and reviewing and improving market conditions to turn this situation around.

How?

Through Innovation and Reinvention – this is the time to think way beyond outside the box, where visionary responses are welcomed instead of fear and stagnation. Our governments are stepping into the unknown places to face the consequences of the crisis. 

Reinvention itself becomes the word of order, and we must try to benefit as much as we can from our evolving digital resources and more than ever support first our national businesses. By redefining our ways, we will find a more balanced situation between self-reliance and globalisation allowing us to become more efficient as independent states, without turning our backs to the great relations we have set worldwide.

For now, our foreign connections should be held mainly digitally through the optimisation of our available digital channels and infrastructures. In the future greater collaborations will arise between nations to fortify our systems and avoid a new crisis!

What we must remember is words like Reinvention, Innovation and Self-Resistance should be constant in our vocabulary, with or without pandemics. In addition, we should practice and test more often our capacity to adjust our businesses to different scenarios, not only for economic survival but also for a more sustainable world.

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2. It’s time for profissional reinvention

The impact on the economy is directly related to how jobs and industries are affected and adapt to this new scenario.

Some physical jobs will probably be lost forever and replaced by more efficient or automate solutions, some could be turned into remote jobs – as remote will become default.

Before the pandemic, predictions talked about 40% of the workforce to be freelancer or location independent by 2020 and 50% by 2035. In this new and increasingly digital world, we predict this numbers will be rise even more. 

The jobs depending on physical encounters will need to adapt and adjust themselves to fit in this new reality – we humans will always need physical interactions.

Finally, in order to cope with this global situation, all businesses will need to be reinvented and new solutions will rise. 

As advocates for the creative professions, we invite you to have a closer look on creative professions: under the lockdown many artists reinvented themselves and were able to keep doing their art online to feed their/ our minds – culture was crucial for our mental survival at home. Once again, this reveals the importance of creative jobs and hope that this crisis helps the society to cherish them more.  

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3. What will our human personal relations look like? What is the place of co-livings?

In an article from the New York times, Luka Lucic (Pratt Institute psychologist who studies the effects of war) is cited “People, during times of prolonged, radical change, end up changing”. Through this pandemic our human relations are already changing and are probably forever changed –  some deliberately, others necessarily or temporary and others permanently. 

What happens is that our humanity is defined by our capacity of communication: we are social animals. With this crisis and in a world that was already so virtual-dependent, the social-distancing imposed made us understand that nothing is comparable to living in real communities and spending actual physical time with the people that matter to us. Nothing is as great as in person connections. Actually, our human relations and support systems have been proven to positively impact both our mental and physical health.

These new times might scare us, makes us feel uncomfortable and anxious, however they are also making us more empathic and kind to each other. This behaviour is called “prosocial behavior” — which leads many people to look after their neighbours, caring for those in need and for the ones we love. Actually, we are seeing people’s priorities changing: the recurrent large gatherings are being substituted by smaller ones with our families and closer friends.

Since travelling won’t be easy before the opening of the borders and control of the pandemic, people will probably enjoy settling, making the best of their own homes and being close to their communities.

How does co-living lifestyle make sense in this new way of interacting?

What co-livers value the most when choosing the lifestyle it’s the possibility to be within a community. Their home is not their country, it is rather the place where they chose to live. With possible lockdowns in the future, co-livers can chose the place where they feel to be and where they can can build their communities. Communities become families and in times of difficulties the co-living lifestyle becomes a greater solution for isolation – co-livers can take care of each other. It’s about the human experience and feeling supported in the hardest days. 

Well, predictions aside, the future is uncertain as we stated before. Adapting to a new future won’t be a smooth or easy, however history as told us over and over the years that we have the power to adapt to every situation. That is the magic in our humanity: our capacity to be creative, to innovate, to change, to fall and to grow again and again.

There is power in staying together, even if physically apart. 

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There is power in staying together, even if physically apart.