Bram Levinson

What’s truly fascinating about this entire experience is that in the efforts to find our way back to “normal”, the Canadian government is shedding light on fault lines that I’ve always been aware of in our society.

We go to school and educate ourselves, ramming information into our brain, spending sleepless nights studying, putting our nervous system through the minefield of exams, only to get a piece of paper that qualifies us to get a job that then requires us to spend inane amounts of time in traffic to get to and from work. We do our best to live up to the career standard of working as much as possible, including waking up earlier than our bodies need, going to work when we are ill and should actually be resting, getting home from work a few hours before we need to get to sleep so we can wake up early the following day to do it all over again.

We look forward to Friday evening.
We look forward to the vacation that, when it arrives, our nervous system recognizes as the perfect time to finally let go of “fight mode”, and the body gets sick and demands the rest it needed all the while.
We look forward to promotion so we can get the ever-elusive pat on the back that allows us to feast on scraps and have a reason to keep the charade going.
We look forward to retirement, when we don’t have to spin why we do all this into a reason we can be at peace with. And hopefully we don’t drop dead of a heart attack soon after.
We save for a rainy day. And hopefully we don’t drop dead of a heart attack soon after.

Four-day work weeks. 10 paid sick days per person annually. There will be more discussion as to how we can have the economy run efficiently while keeping people healthy in the process..and I guarantee you that the economy will suffer, and it’s about fucking time it did. The priority should not be how valuable one nation’s currency is in comparison to any other country’s, in fact our notion of currency itself should be reexamined and redefined. This experience has proven to us that the economy is more fragile than anyone dared to fear, and it’s the last thing we should be putting importance on.

The health of a population comes down to their physical and mental well-being. Period. Full stop. This universal truth, however, has been inversely proportional to what governments, politicians and economists have considered valuable. Invest in your people and you invest in the health of your nation, your company, your family, your community. Why is this so revolutionary?

The future I expect to see:

When you feel ill, you are encouraged to stay home. Finally.

When you want to take a break from work to, as is said in our Québécois French, “penser à autre chose” (think of something else) or “changer les idées” (change the thoughts/ideas), you will have the freedom and time to because you will most likely be working remotely, or your company will recognize the mood-fatigue-stress-immune system correlations. Finally.

When you want or need a day off of work because your body needs to rest and relax, you will get paid for that day. Finally.

And by the way, for those of you who end up working for people and companies who aren’t learning the big lessons from this experience and get grief for prioritizing your health going forward? Find a new job. Ditch the bitch and make the switch. Survival of the fittest will be the greatest judge of a company’s longevity now, and being corporately fit will be directly related to the wellness of the employees. Take the leap you’ve suspected needed to be taken all this time and stop wasting time with people and employers who you’ve been so loyal to for so long, but who couldn’t give the slightest shit about you and your well-being.

It only took a global pandemic. Use it as the wake-up call that it is. Today.

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