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Times are tough, and life is unpredictable. Sigh!

Intriguingly, when we toss both facts — times are bad and we’re a short-lived species — into the “washer-dryer of our minds,” three truths tumble out:

1. We need to work hard for our money;
2. We need to work longer for our money; and
3. We’d better love our work because we’ll be doing it for a long time.

WORK HARD

Historian Francis Parkman wrote: “He who would do some great things in this short life must apply himself to work with such a concentration of force that, to idle spectators who live only to amuse themselves, looks like insanity.”

Even in the best of times, hard work is the primary prerequisite for a productive life of purpose. And, as you well know, now is not a spectacular time.

In a July 21 briefing note on Covid-19 published by consulting giant McKinsey and Company, it was estimated that by 2025, the pandemic would have cost the world between US$16 trillion and US$35 trillion. I take that to be the estimated range of lost aggregate planetary gross domestic product.

Well, with the world now carrying just under 7.9 billion people and assuming that rises to over 8.1 billion in 2025, the average human population over the next four years will be eight billion.

If I were then to select a reasonable number between US$16 trillion and US$35 trillion, I’d be inclined — in the interest of simplifying my back-of-envelope analysis — to choose US$24 trillion in total lost global GDP.

Note: US$24 trillion divided by eight billion people comes to US$3,000 of lost GDP per person from the start of the pandemic till 2025. However, given the income devastation and business Armageddon we’ve experienced and observed, that dollar amount seems low to me. But if we presume economies and personal incomes bounce up with a vengeance from 2023 onward, then perhaps US$3,000 is right.

While some commentators use per capita GDP as a proxy for per capita income, that isn’t quite right. I won’t bother explaining the differences here. What I will say is — both in total and therefore also on average — the Covid-19 pandemic has made our planet and the average person on it poorer.

Therefore, if we wish to buck that downward trend personally, we will have to work harder (and, of course, smarter) than we’ve ever worked before to stay abreast of our pre-pandemic selves. And if our goal is actually to get ahead, we’ll need to work much harder.

WORK LONG

In addition to working more intensely per unit time, most of us will likely need to bid adieu to the norm of holding merely one job that we work for 40 hours a week.

More of us will have to tack on extra part-time work or even try to juggle two full-time positions to boost our working hours per week up into the stratospheric 50 to 90 range.

I know this isn’t what anyone wishes to hear, but it’s how our lives will change over the next few years as we thumb our noses at the SARS-CoV-2 virus that has stolen too much from us, and as we declare we’ll do what we must to bolster our finances and buttress our careers.

It will be hard. But committing long hours in significant work has therapeutic value, at least according to Charles Evans Hughes, the 11th Chief Justice of the United States from 1930 to 1941. He said, “I believe in work, hard work, and long hours of work. Men do not break down from overwork but from worry and dissipation.”

Yet if we’re going to work harder and longer than ever, we’d be also better…

LOVE OUR WORK

Remember, our mortal years are brief. If we’re going to toil throughout our prime decades to get by in the world, we owe it to ourselves to navigate the jagged reefs of boredom into the bright, intriguing, compelling harbors of fascination.

Novelist Mark Twain once observed: “The law of work does seem utterly unfair — but there it is, and nothing can change it; the higher the pay in enjoyment the worker gets out of it, the higher shall be his pay in money also.”

So, throughout this season of WFH (work-from-home), do mull deeply — aided by your pen on paper in a journal of dreams that you keep private — on how you may ramp up your income or revenue-generating activities over the next few years as you pursue a higher income so you may save and invest aggressively for your delayed season of blissful retirement.