Business as usual

The oft-repeated reason people give in lambasting stricter restrictions on their movements during this pandemic is because the economy will suffer. This is also the same reason people give when they speak against measures to address climate change.

This business as usual mentality is what is bringing us to the edge of economic and ecological disaster. If we still cannot find the connection between our economic systems and the environment, I worry for the younger generations because things are bound to get worse for them in the near future.

This reminds me of a quote from the user experience (UX) design conference I just attended online last weekend: “You can’t see the forest for the trees.” In our everyday lives, while it is important to pay attention to the details, it is more important not to lose sight of the bigger picture.

In designing a solution to our problems today, the role of context plays an important part in the decision-making that takes place. But our present economic system has long denied the fact that we are all “magkaugnay” or connected. It has led us to become mindless consumers of things we actually do not need and goods that make us sick. With this year’s pandemic and multiple ecological disasters, there is no better time to be talking about changing our attitude and behavior toward the environment.

In her talk entitled “How to Pioneer Change (& How Not To)” during last weekend’s “UXPH CONF 2020: Designers as Navigators of Change,” Styliana Sarris, senior user experience designer of Tigerspike, spelled out the reason why it is hard for us modern humans to adapt to a zero-carbon economy. Sarris said that as we’re going through life we are constantly iterating our behavior based on the feedback loop of the response that we get from our behavior. But the problem is that we don’t always receive an ‘honest’ feedback from the environment about our behavior. “Sometimes we receive reinforcement where we shouldn’t and punishment where we shouldn’t.”

Sarris illustrated her point with a water bottle example. “I go to a store, I buy a water bottle, drink the water in it and I quench my thirst. So far so good. And the last of my experience with this water bottle is that I put it in the bin and then it goes away. It kind of just disappears from my line of sight,” Sarris said. Our feedback loop from the environment in drinking water from that plastic bottle is positive. We don’t really get to see how that water bottle later on has killed a turtle, or has disintegrated into microplastics that get into the fish that we eat.

This is how our business as usual attitude and behaviors are formed.

We convert lands left and right for industrial and residential use without long-term planning and risk assessment. The destruction to our lives and economy is not immediately seen, but once it is felt so tragically and painfully, that is the only time we talk about the need for ecological balance.

For another, we see a continuing decline in COVID-19 cases weeks into a relaxed MECQ status and then we start lowering our guard. Nothing alarming has happened anyway for several days since we started converging in restaurants, in shops, and in private gatherings. What we don’t realize is that the feedback loop is just delayed, as science, which we often ignore, has warned us. Then when the number of cases starts rising again, we decry the restrictions on our movements. We miss business as usual.