Margins (personal and societal)
(Pandemic Diary - day 49)
From my journal: 16 April 2020 (Thursday)
I make marginal gains, and I take some marginal losses, and I mainly count it as success if the gains even marginally outweigh the losses over the course of weeks and months. Big movement and great change just doesn’t happen much for me. And since where I’m at now isn’t bad, that’s okay.
That privilege of not having to make large changes, the fact that our personal situation is reasonably stable and resilient, brings some peace of mind, but it also brings complacency and low performance. I don’t have to change, and so I don’t work very hard at changing.
There’s no punchline here, only that observation, and the explanation for my own actions (and lack thereof) it provides.
But…
…much of our society does not share that privileged position of stability and personal resiliency. This pandemic is highlighting the fact that we don’t have a lot of cushion in our world.
This struck me as I was listening to statistics about our current situation. I don’t remember the numbers exactly, but the basic observation is that some small percentage changes are causing some very large problems.
When the unemployment rate moves from 3% to 10%, there are still 90% of us working. Yes, if you’re part of that 10% it could be disastrous for you and your family personally, but if it’s also disastrous for the country, then the country (the country — our collective society, not just our government) is operating on a margin that is too small. Small percentage swings should not bring national crisis.
Likewise though, the people whose personal margins are so small that the loss of a month’s pay is disaster for them. The paycheck-to-paycheck status of so many people (regardless of the size of that paycheck) is a very fragile way to live, precarious, vulnerable, marginal. And apparently a whole lot of people are in that situation.
We’ve been there, too, and it seems to me that for most of us it’s a choice. We may not realize we made a choice, and more likely it’s a long series of small choices instead of a single decision, a lifestyle that we’ve slipped into.
We choose to allow our margins to remain small. Regardless of our resources, there are choices we make to spend those resources or save them to build a reserve that will give us larger margins, more cushion, a cache.
Yes, there are situations where that cache can disappear instantly, and there might be some rare instances where there truly is nothing left to save, no cuts to make. But for the most part, we stay leveraged by choice.
We rationalize our needs, allow our relative perception of deprivation to creep slowly upward so that luxuries become necessities, we spend our extra money on extra indulgence instead of cushion.
The size of your personal emergency fund, how much inventory a store keeps in reserve at each location, how large a stash of emergency PPE a hospital maintains… it’s the same thing, with the same goal of squeezing as much out of the moment as possible. Yes, it’s more efficient that way, but it is also more vulnerable, less resilient, more susceptible to bad effects from small changes in our situations, whether that’s the interruption of shipping or the loss of a job or pandemic shelter-in-place requirements.
Maybe this pandemic experience will lead us to change that. Maybe we’ll build more resilience into our systems by expanding our margins. Maybe we’ll make a specific effort to maintain a larger emergency fund of cash, and maybe we’ll maintain more than a just-in-time stock of essentials in each of our houses, and maybe stores will do the same.
Maybe we’ll realize that the increased cushion, and the resiliency that comes with it, is worth sacrificing for.
Most of us don’t have to live on the razor’s edge, we only choose to.