Is this the new pandemic prescription?

On Tuesday, January 4, I heard Dr Bonnie Henry say, we’re in for a challenging few weeks, so “default to less, not more.”

Back in the early days of the pandemic, we were invited to reduce our social contacts to 60% of the usual. It made me think that I could take that as a barometer for all behaviour and expectations – ie I will reduce everything back to 60%, so I have some capacity to deal with the unexpected, the unprecedented, the disruptive and the dang annoying. I didn’t fully embrace it, but in hindsight, wish I had. Striving. It’s so overrated.

In a recent social (not serious) conversation, about how a ski program could manage having so many coaches off with illness, we wondered if programs could run every second weekend, instead of every weekend.

Do half as much.

And enjoy it twice as much.

Not to get lost in the details, or quagmired in your frustration generally… but is it possible that, if you read half the number of books a year, you’d savour them more? If you tasked yourself with half the number of to-dos, could you go slower and revel a little more? If you decided to treat yourself only to one square of chocolate an evening, would you take 10 minutes to completely enjoy it?

Signing up last week for a New Year’s stream of yoga classes at Village Yoga, I realized I had cut back my outings, workouts and connections by at least half, but the appreciation for being in that virtual community was definitely something I doubled down on.

What if we tried this as a general shift? Could we use the pandemic as a prompt to solve the climate crisis, before it gets any worse? Consume half. Enjoy it twice as much. The math of de-growth.

I wonder.