When we founded Culture Shift Agency in 2019 we defined this thing we’re calling “Culture Shift” as a…
…profound change in how we relate to the world around us, each other, and ultimately ourselves.
Culture is in constant flux and it often moves so slowly that we don’t even bother looking up from our daily lives to really take notice. It’s often not until viewed through the rearview window of yesterday that we see the degree to which some culture-shifting force (person, event, invention, technology, etc.) has affected us.
Look at the smartphone, social media, Netflix, and Amazon. And it certainly does not apply only to tech – take what started as “women’s lib” in the late 50s, or the interest in yoga, or the MeToo movement, or climate change which we’re in the midst of.
Then there are those we refer to as “culture shifters” – individuals, artists, entrepreneurs, and the like with vision, ambition, and determination to stake a claim in our collective future and attempt to scale their ideas and vision into the wider culture. Some are cultural icons, famous or infamous depending on your vantage point – Gloria Steinham, Ralph Nader, Wayne LaPierre, Donald Trump, Barack Obama. And there are others not so well known – Joe Cherner (NYC anti-smoking activist), Roberta “Bobbi” Gibb (snuck into and ran the 1966 Boston Marathon after being denied entry because women weren’t “physiologically able" to run long distances).
Let’s not forget the artists - the visionaries using art to change the world - to open our eyes to new ways of looking at things – The Beatles, Banksy, Keith Haring, Beyoncé, Anni Lebovitz, and Maya Angelou.
But wait! Let’s not forget the people in our everyday lives working diligently on the local level to make change. A formerly homeless woman starts a company committed to supplying feminine hygiene products to homeless women which helps them feel valued and seen. A neighborhood bands together fighting to keep a local grocery store chain from losing their lease to a Walgreens, keeping wealth in the neighborhood and preserving a shopping experience that’s personal and local.
These are a few of the thousands of examples – some of which have scaled to levels of wide cultural impact…
…and now, we add to the list a virus – COVID-19.
COVID-19 is not a person nor a technology nor a change driven by human activity but a virus scaled to a pandemic level. Pandemics are not new – we think of the granddaddy of all pandemics, the Black Death or the Bubonic Plague of 14th century Europe. There have been other pandemics more recently such as SARS (2002) and H1N1 (2009) and we’ve been warned that a pandemic such as COVID is inevitable but to consider a virus culture-shifting?
Need I remind you of AIDs? By the end of the eighties, almost 100,000 people died. It was not only a devastating and troubling time for so many, it was a powerful contributor to a cultural shift in our attitudes towards sex. As sex became a potential death-sentence, we watched in fear and horror as friends and family died from this seemingly unstoppable disease.
When all is said and done, the AIDs epidemic was a cultural game-changer bringing not only the disease and the fight for its cure to the forefront but also piloting our culture towards more widespread acceptance of homosexuality and same-sex marriage and the eventual cultural awakening to concepts like trans and gender-fluidity.
COVID-19 is also a game-changer but in a completely different way. Unlike AIDs, this disease can’t be ‘othered’ into denial by dismissing it as something that only affects ‘others’. This virus is global and fast-moving, Its spread is indiscriminate reaching across all walks of life crossing divides of social strata as celebrities, world leaders, and everyday folk test positive.
The real issue is not what happens to individuals but what happens when lots of people all get sick at the same time and show up at medical offices, hospitals and emergency rooms where there’s a limited or complete lack of COVID-19-specific tests, along with an inadequate number of beds and ventilators for extreme cases.
To ameliorate the potential overwhelm, we’re faced with remedies like social distancing, lockdowns, business closures, school shutdowns and quarantines. These remedies, although necessary, are having devastating effects on the lives of millions of individuals and. laying bare the limitations of our social institutions and safety nets – particularly our healthcare system and our economic and financial system.
The supreme irony of this situation is in times of national and global crisis when our human nature rises from within compelling us to pull together and unite, forces from without are advising and mandating us to isolate and distance ourselves.
I ask, when the threat of the spreading infection subsides and we begin the recovery and resumption of our lives and systems and some new normal begins to settle in, what’s the lasting culture shift that’s going to take hold?
Does the answer lie in the conundrum of the primal human need for community being short-circuited by social distancing edicts? Are we being challenged to push beyond our default modes of connection and forced to think and connect in new ways? Is the isolation and distancing a call to go inward? Engage in creative activities? Connect with more intention and purpose? Or are we busier than ever just coping and trying to hold it all together?
COVID-19 reminds me that perhaps it’s time to be still for a moment. To ask questions and be in critical and creative conversation with others.
What is COVID-19 dismantling, illuminating, and forcing? What is it revealing, teaching, and breaking? How will we pay the rent or mortgage or buy food? How do we feel when we slow down? How do we feel when we can’t go to our weekly dance class or to church? What are the costs of closing schools, restaurants, theaters and art spaces? On a national or global level, our leaders are scrambling. How will they lead? Can they lead our spirits toward hope and our action toward balanced, compassionate and thoughtful solutions?
More than ever it points to how we’re all in this together. The top-down, keep-the-economy-growing-at-all-cost every-man-for-himself mentality no longer works (did it ever truly work?) when we’re forced to acknowledge we’re all in the same boat together and there are no life rafts.
No one has all the answers, and it’s not just about answers. Questions can bring us into dialogue with ourselves and our communities. Our system is being tested. We are being tested.
As the globe takes pause during this pandemic we have an opportunity to dig deep. We have an opportunity to take part in creating something new – a cultural shift – be it personal, within your circle of family and friends, local, national or global. We have an opportunity to take these external circumstances being thrust upon us and bring them inward to wrestle and to come to terms with so that we may transform them outward to make our world a different place.
How will that world look? The answer lies in what we as individuals and as a society truly value and whether we have the will and courage to stick by and stand up for what we believe in and to come together to find common ground.
When all is done and the dust has settled, there will be a new normal. Will our choices create a new normal much like the old or will we be able to stretch, grow and perhaps leap into something truly new?
In these upcoming weeks and months we at Culture Shift Agency will be with you through this change. Tracking, struggling, wrestling and contemplating. We will be talking with change makers and innovators and thinkers and doers about what is happening, where it’s going, what they’re doing and thinking, and what we can do. We want to hear from you too. How are you being challenged? How are you being pressed to change? To adapt? To shift?