some of the good things about this pandemic we are having in 2020 is that it has shown us that it is possible to do things we never thought were possible. like thousands of people without jobs but the other systems keep on ticking on. that it is possible for children to get an education without going to school. that some people don't have to drive to work and back every single work day. that you don't have to physically visit a doctor if you just want to talk about things. or you don't have to physically meet to have a meeting.

there's probably heaps of others that I can't think of it this time.

because many employers have realised that they can save heaps of money by not renting office space a lot of them are telling their employers they will never come back to work in the office fulltime. they are and will be mostly working at home.

at the bigger picture end governments,in particular the Australian government seems to want to get things going back the way that it used to be.

the logic they are using to justify this, is flawed.

as I understand it,the logic runs this way:

we need to get people back to work so that the economy gets kick started.

promotion of manufacturing is what has been suggested.

however most manufacturing, these days, is very much automated so if governments give money to enterprises for the purposes of manufacturing, the enterprises are not going to spend the money in employing people. they will use the money to purchase machinery, which removes people from employment.

an alternative would be to promote the services sector. however again the service sector is reasonable highly automated so any employee, is more likely to want to spend the money on the automation rather than employing people. it appears that the profit motive of reducing cost is whats possibly getting in the way. more on this later. none of this takes into account the possibility of mass automation in the future, because of exponential technological advances.

materialism or moreism is not good for aggregate mental health.

apparently there's been many studies that show this. here is a link to three of them

as can be seen, the biggest thing people are suffering from with this pandemic is not being able to associate with other people. even though they may have all the material items and physical services that they may want. it's basically a psychological problem.

it appears to me you can't fix psychological problems by producing more items. yet that's what the media, government, the education system and basically societal pressure would have us believe. advertising in mass media promotes the concept that all you need is more of something and you'll feel better. you may feel better with the initial purchase,but in a long run it's like an addiction, you have to keep on buying more to make you feel better. that's not a long-term solution.

I found a website on moreism that goes into a bit more detailed than I have. but I find it amusing that the person is using the website to promote their copyrighted book to promote ways to overcome moreism, which in turn is making them “more” income.

I remember seeing a video about parents trying to do right by ther children. The parents wanted to work harder to get a better job to buy more things for ther children. but when the children what are asked, independently, what they wanted from ther parents, they said they just wanted to spend more time with them.

this pandemic has made it so we can see that it's not only children but basically everybody just getting together thats whats needed.

rather than the government promoting manufacturing why not promote general mental health. not only may it end up with a psychologist better society because mental health and education on mental health cannot be automated like other things can be, we may end up being economical better in a shorter period of time.

in a previous time when there's been economic recession and governments needed to stimulate the economy, they got people to do physical work. one such example was the great Ocean road in Southern Victoria. I was told recently that it is the longest war memorial in the world.

a person was given a shovel and told to start working. as one started to slow down the shovel was given to someone else and they started working. other than the fact that it employ a hell of a lot of people, all those involved communicated with each other.

the output of workplaces is not what fixes psychological problems it's the fact that there's communication within the workplace.

machines do better jobs of producing goods and services than people in today's modern society. but our present economic system. operates on the basis that people do work get rewarded for it in money and then use the money to spend so as the create more work for other people. the more syndrome. this virus situation has proved that that's not going to operate in the long term.

but promoting good mental health could.

there has to be a transition from one system to another. preferably an ordered transition.

a guy called Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper “A theory of Human Motivation”.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs

proposed that there is a hierarchy of human needs, and that as one meet is met other needs are created. although there is no scientific evidence to prove his theory, it is generally accepted that is how it operates.

self-actualisation is meant to be at the top of the pyramid of needs. Maslow describes this as the desire to accomplish everything that one can, to become the most that one can be.

my idea of an utopian system is a non economic society. it seems to me that money, wealth and moreness are what are creating the physiological problems in societies. many alternative economic systems have been proposed, and many even tried, but they all suffer from the issue of limited resources being allocated against unlimited wants.