Post Corona: From Crisis to Opportunity

by Scott Galloway

Two weeks later, I left the jacket at my Boy Scouts meeting, but I assured my mom we’d get it back at the next meeting. We didn’t. So, off to JCPenney to get another jacket. This time my mom told me the jacket was my Christmas present, as we couldn’t afford gifts after buying another jacket. I don’t know if this was true or if she was trying to teach me a lesson. Likely both. Regardless, I tried to feign excitement at my early Christmas present. A few weeks later, though, I . . . lost the jacket. That day, I sat at home after school, waiting for my mom to come home, feeling the body blow I had delivered to our economically distressed household. Yes, it was just a lost jacket, but I was nine. And the point is not that I had a hard life—I didn’t, by any reasonable measure. The point is that it was just a jacket. But my sense of economic anxiety was already so finely tuned that the loss of a jacket was chilling. I will never forget that feeling of dread and self-loathing I felt that day.