5 Skills You Think You Didn’t Need Before The Coronavirus (But You Do Now)
From a thriving sharing economy to a home-based lifestyle, the new normal is about to bring back skills we all thought we didn’t need anymore.
Like many young professionals, I started my career at the boom of the sharing economy. Like many of my peers, I was used to things coming at me with a push of a button — my meal plan, groceries, laundry, cleaning services, repairmen, an Uber or Grab to bring me to wherever I needed to go. It was a great time to be young with a lifestyle subsidised by venture capitalists. Until it wasn’t.
By March 2020, virtually every country in the world has been told to social distance, shut their doors and stay safe at home. With a vaccine months away from completion and even longer to disseminate to enough people to make it safe for our herds, we’re slowly moving to a point where we must accept that the life we know before this pandemic is over and we need to learn all the skills we thought we didn’t need if we want to survive.
Here are a few skills that you might need to take up, sooner rather than later:
1. Investing in being mobile
With public transportation, especially in developing countries, often heat spots for intense crowding, for our own safety we have to become mobile on our terms. In places where public transportation have been halted, there have already been various cases of deaths related to not being able to leave their homes during countrywide lockdowns.
Lucky are those who already know how to drive or ride a bike and just need to find a way to procure their vehicle of choice, but those who don’t need to learn right away if they want to be able to move during everything from a grocery run to a medical emergency. If you have a big enough space in your backyard and haven’t taught your kids to ride a bike yet, this is the perfect time to do it.
2. Cooking from healthy food from local ingredients
As the pandemic wreaks havoc on supply chains everywhere, it’s increasingly becoming clear that we could no longer expect to eat the way we used to. With the increasing transportation restrictions, farmers everywhere are struggling to sell their fruits and vegetables.
Gone are the days we could expect low prices for imported goods. If we all don’t want to starve and rely on processed food, we need to keep our natural immunity up against the possible new waves of illnesses. We need to learn how to cook and I mean really cook again. This time with local ingredients.
3. Basic home repairs
The longer spend inside our homes, the more we can’t ignore it’s little faults — a dripping bidet flooding your bathroom, a cabinet that isn’t attached properly, or wall cracks that you just can’t keep your eyes off during that morning zoom call.
While it’s not advisable to do some things without professional help like issues electrical wiring, gas or anything to do with your roof, learning how to do little repairs can save you a lot of money in the long run and lessen the need for exposure to workers that probably go to dozens of homes on a regular basis. If like me, you didn’t own a proper tool box before getting quarantined, this might be the time to finally invest in one and learn how to use it.
4. Cleaning our homes (and ourselves) properly
While most of us know how to clean in some way or form, many of us don’t know how to clean properly. Many of us don’t know how to deep clean our beds, how often we should actually wash our sheets, replace our sponges and clear out our refrigerators.
We also have to become aware of controlling food wastage by managing expiration dates, learning techniques on how to properly store perishables to increase their shelf lives and limit the number of times we have to order in.
And it’s not just maintaining the cleanliness of our homes but also the cleanliness of what goes in it. We have to become more aware of ways to sanitise everything from wiping down groceries (every single can, fruit and vegetable), having a bleach soak for our shoes and grooming our pets who may carrying traces of pathogens on their fur.
In fact, what the coronavirus pandemic taught us as a species in an instant is that our old ways of sanitation were clearly not up to par. Masks, gloves and social distancing are great, but please, stop touching your face and wash your hands.
5. Psychological first aid
As we enter a new chaotic phase of human history, many people including yourself may not be able to cope with everything right away. There will be people who will have lost or already lost loved ones to either virus or not being able to access critical care right away because of it. There will be people who will be losing careers, homes and businesses that they may have spent years of their lives building and can never get back. There will be people who will become unstable from not having any human contact for long periods of time.
It’s estimated that 15–20% of people affected by crisis will need mental health services. And while this doesn’t mean you can become a psychotherapist overnight, you can learn how to both properly care for your own mental wellbeing and be more empathetic and be a better listener to the people in your life that may need immediate crisis intervention or be directed towards the next level of care.
It’s clear that many young people like me are still mourning a version of our lives that we thought we were going to have — a chance to travel the world easily, having big weddings, watching live concerts, signing up for a club at big recruiting event at university, attending graduation ceremonies, being part of a big work conference, being able to hold our spouse’s hand when they’re giving birth or even the little things, like having drinks out with friends or seeing our elderly parents.
But like every generation before us who wished things like these didn’t happen during their time, we hold whoever we can hold tighter, try to be grateful for the roofs over our heads and the food on our tables and just do our best to keep on keeping on.
#life-lessons #thenewnormal #covid19 #skills
