Resiliency is a Paradigm Shift Away
A resilient society begins with its people. It’s a volatile time and the world seems to be igniting more fires than it’s putting out. As the stock market explodes and society continues to migrate online, reality seems to have gone amiss. There is a new type of dissatisfaction plaguing our city that can only be quelled by the illusive superficiality of the digital world. The semantic and syntactic dialogue — what we say and how we say it — are governed by the very institutions that have had to pivot during the emergence of COVID-19/tech.
There is a causal link between paradigm shifts and the transfer of societal values between institutions and its people. Building a resilient society starts in the core institutes that run it. In order to change culture, we must change the lexicon. Following the introduction of new paradigms result in older schools of thought to naturally phase out, as the majority of new generations adopt them. The importance of paradigm shifts to catalyze societal values and is intended to renovate social, political, and economical issues. Rewriting the core of where our culture pulses, we can strengthen the thread that strings us all together.
Stimulating economic growth — Buying local, supporting small businesses, and employing entrepreneurship drive economic growth and stimulate our GDP per capita. Shopping at local boutiques, farmers markets, service shops etc., increases employment rates, contributes to improved public infrastructure, and socially and economically invests in your community. Buying locally may be difficult based on your own specific lockdown roles, as most mom-and-pop shops have been asked to board up. Some locations curbside-pickup or shop-by-appointment options available for the time being.
Emotional maturity — being able to control your emotions is the ultimate form of discipline. We’ve become hypersensitive to the provocations of clickbait while this overstimulation has desensitized us from cultivating deeper emotional connections and synapses with ourselves and each other. Emotional maturity is an umbrellaing intelligence that is helpful in dealing in a plethora of situations, both professionally and personally. Emotionally maturity is not just being able to stay calm in stressful situations, but goes further into your understanding of who you are. Taking responsibility, being empathetic, and seeking delayed gratification are all byproducts of emotional maturity. A higher sense of awareness is cultivated by this intelligence and allows you to experience things more fully.
Critical thinking — This is a skillset that can be taught, and it should start in the classroom.
Children and students need a holistic approach to education. Fostering students to understand problems through different perspectives will prepare them for real life problems in and out of the workplace. Standardized curricula cause paralysis in constructive thought, its intrinsic progress, and its external manifestation. Traditional learning is systemized to hinder reasoning by reducing bigger ideas into symbols that fit into a certain structure rather than exploring the true meaning of words, how we react to them, etc. Integrating critical thinking into the academic agenda has been overrun by teaching academic content. Knowledge of content — background knowledge- is more valued than the ability to perceive and catalyze it. Content and thinking critically about are two mutually exclusive components, where the former is pushed by current public and traditional curricula.
Environmental intelligence — We’ve reached the point of no return, all that’s left to do is sustain. Conscious consumption, greenwashing, and recycling are all exhausted keywords that do not seem to have caused much change. Sustainable development protocols must be enforced into institutional habits to become the counter-culture adopted as the societal norm of next generations. Illuminating sociopolitical and academic sustainability movements create a new lexicon for incorporating sustainable development throughout institutional, educational, and social culture for long-term progress.
Online etiquette — Technology is becoming less a separate entity and more a common, daily nuance. Because of this, it’s important to log off as regularly as possible. As most institutions have created their own space in the digital landscape, we are constantly distracted by emails, notifications, and multimedia, there seems to be little time for offline daily activities.
Chant Vartanian
