My new coronavirus-era gig doesn’t pay a dime, but it’s a total sanity saver—and I love it.

I never thought of myself as a political writer. As a matter of fact, there was a time in my life when I didn’t think of myself as political at all. For decades I’ve been in advertising, which is by nature commercial, not political.

Yet here I am, lead writer on the Shahid Buttar for Congress campaign.

If you don’t know Shahid (pronounced “SHAH-hid”), he’s running for Congress to represent San Francisco, in Nancy Pelosi’s current seat. A progressive Democrat who’s also a privacy protection attorney, he’s a veteran of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a kind of cyberpunk Justice League which successfully blocked the needless surveillance of Americans’ personal information.

It’s an uphill battle, but that’s the kind of challenge I like. Avis: We’re #2, we try harder. (Look it up, kids.)

The job is 100 percent pro bono/volunteer, and it’s taking up more of my time and energy than I anticipated. Between Slack, Zoom, and the actual writing process, I’m more drained at the end of some days than I was working for an in-house agency.

So why am I loving it so much?

Part of it is the way this work fits into my new sensibility. I was always politically aware, but as an observer, like a space alien curious about earthlings’ ways. In recent years, though, I’ve become more involved, and COVID-19, which affects an extraordinary range of life’s facets from healthcare to employment to the way we socialize, has only sharpened that involvement. (Shahid’s platform includes healthcare as a human right.)

Another part of it is that I’m just made to write. To paraphrase Twilight Zone and Star Trek writer Harlan Ellison, it’s what I’m for. Not having any assignments for a month or so should have felt like a fun break, but instead it felt like a piece of me was missing.

Finally, as a little bit of a celebrity stalker, I’ve enjoyed being on Zoom calls with minor political figures. I can’t say who they are, but if you follow progressive politics, you’d recognize their names.

Don’t get me wrong. I like receiving fair compensation for the work I do, and look forward to the day when I can do so again.

And I certainly would never work free for a for-profit company. That’s called slavery.

But with paying work hard to come by this summer, I have to admit nonpaying work is satisfying. It uses all the skills I used in advertising: Research, presentation, strategy and conceptualization, and writing itself.

Best of all, I don’t have to sit on a long train ride and go to an office I might or might not want to be in for 40 hours every week. I can just write, do virtual meetings, and have fun.

Find a cause you like and try it sometime.

A whole new way may not be possible, but business as usual definitely isn’t.

This is odd: When you scroll down LinkedIn these days, about half the posts look like there’s nothing wrong. You definitely can’t tell there’s a pandemic going on. No reference at all to the genuinely weird context that we’re all working from home, and that many of us are in danger of catching a terrible disease if we go out—or, in the case of New Yorkers, even if we don’t.

The other half of the posts do acknowledge the pandemic, but in an anodyne, feckless way that suggests that if we just wait, everything will go back to normal. “We’re all in this together.” “Together, even though we’re apart.” “In these uncertain times.” “Stay safe, stay home, stay positive.” You know what I’m talking about.

In my view, neither half really gets it.

The denial crowd is hoping the tiger in the room will walk away if they just whistle and ignore it. Meanwhile, the meaningless platitude crowd thinks it will turn into a friendly pet, if they just speak nice words to it and maybe feed it a tiny bite of their burger.

Either way, I wouldn’t bet against the tiger.

This can all be explained by the class time lag. Blue collar workers like drivers, servers, and bartenders, who make up the quasi-invisible service economy, were laid off long before white collar managerial and creative professionals. Now the pandemic is starting to hit us too, but it still doesn’t feel quite real yet, even to those who’ve lost their jobs.

The only real solution, which no one wants to hear because it would involve some effort and adjustment, is a completely different approach to work and business, as well as, I believe, the role of government—both federal and state/local.

Some of these pieces are tied to each other, but some can be done by forward-thinking businesses independent of any government action, and I hope they will be:

Separate health insurance from employment and make it a human right for every American citizen
Add non-citizens too, since contagious germs don’t care who they infect
Ban quarterly reports, which force all business decisions to be made for pure short-term gain, and make reports annual, or even biannual
Require sustainability, health, and safety experts, as well as frontline essential workers, to be present at shareholder meetings and allow them to speak
Heavily penalize any company that violates worker health rights—the viewpoint of Amazon’s whistleblowing ex-Vice President Tim Bray, who just quit because he didn’t want to be a party to actual murder
Provide generous paid sick leave, childcare, and (when needed) protective gear for all employees
Raise the minimum wage so that one person can live on one job, including a one-bedroom apartment, and—as most developed nations have done—cap C-level pay ratios to make up the difference (right now the ratio of top exec pay to average worker pay must be disclosed, but there are no penalties for it being high)
Finally, and this is the overall rule that informs all the others, realize that if one worker suffers, we all do—regardless of status or pay grade—and that this isn’t some meaningless lofty platitude, but simply the way germs think

If Tom Hanks or the CEO of Morgan Stanley can be infected with COVID-19, anyone can. Next time, let’s make sure no one does.

Nostalgia is natural, but it’s hurting us. A lot.

It feels comfortable, like a favorite sweatshirt. Comforting, like a creamy cheesy winter casserole. It just feels right.

But it’s wrong.

We can’t go back to the way things were before the pandemic, because that way lies an end to everything.

We want to. Really, really badly. This has been such a disruptive experience on so many levels.

There’s the lifestyle level: Not being able to go out to restaurants, shows and clubs, not even being able to shop freely or get a haircut, being stuck in the same place.

Then there’s the more basic level of those who are laid off and suddenly lack healthcare (almost always tied to employment in the U.S., unlike other developed countries)—just when they need it most.

Some even lack money to pay their rent or even buy groceries.

And of course, for the unlucky, there’s illness and even death.

With all these changes going on, of course everyone longs to go back to simpler times. But they don’t exist, and never did.

Do we really want to go back to a time when this country had seven active civilian-killing wars going on? When Big Banks got trillions in bailouts, while regular people were thrown out of their homes and onto the streets? When there was a new school shooting every week, and a new group of promising creatives got gobbled up by hostile holding companies every month?

Or do we want to go back further than that, when American teens were being fed into the Iraq War hopper by the millions, in service of “evidence” that turned out to be a lie for Big Oil companies? Companies that now want yet another federal bailout because suddenly no one can drive, fly or take cruises?

Or even further than that, when it was routine for women and people of color to be treated as second-class citizens? When agency creatives, almost without exception, worked on cigarettes, disgusting unhealthy junk food, pollutive gasoline and gas-guzzling cars, or some other personal or planetary poison?

I don’t think any of us really wants to go back there. I know I don’t.

What we need to get to, rather rapidly, is a point where the future feels more comfortable than the past, because it’s the only real choice any of us has.

And we’re not going to get there by following big political organizations, on either the left or the right. One wants to go back to the 2010’s, so far away yet so tantalizingly close, while the other wants to go all the way back to the 1950’s. We don’t have the luxury of doing either.

We need a new way forward. And marketing needs to lead the way by:

Abandoning old models that don’t work any longer, such as basing all marketing strategies on short-term quarterly earnings
Asking questions about how our clients’ products and services fit into the new future we all face together, where we all either thrive or face extinction
Refusing to be satisfied with empty gestures that sympathetically intone “We’re together, even though we’re apart” while offering nothing to the increasingly large percentage of Americans struggling to make rent, buy groceries and receive basic healthcare
Being brave enough to call out denial when we see it
Understanding the difference between a brand—a promise that’s made to customers and truly kept, supported by marketing—and “branding,” a combination of logo design, trendy look and feel, and copy voice that’s meaningless except to other marketers
Staying aware, painful though it can be, of the inflection point we’re all living in, and making choices—in our jobs as well as outside of them—that build a more sustainable and equitable world

Marketing is dead. Long live marketing.

Once about every couple of years, marketing or advertising is pronounced dead, usually because of automation or the Internet or some other change vector everyone could see coming from a mile away.

This time feels different, though. Maybe it’s all the marketers who’ve now been laid off, even though they thought their jobs were safer than those of the restaurant workers, bartenders, and rideshare drivers they count on.

Or maybe it’s all the casualties, people who’ve actually died from coronavirus. If you’re a marketing professional of a certain age, you probably know one personally. If so, I’m sorry for your loss.

Some have said this pandemic is Mother Nature’s way of sending humans to our rooms to think about what we’ve built. I think there’s some truth to that and I think it goes double for marketers.

The standard drill for marketers is to drink a venti triple latte with oat milk, get pumped up about how great their product is, and then try to sell it through their channel of choice. But they don’t really believe it’s great. That’s why the latte’s there.

Steve Jobs famously said when recruiting John Sculley to run Apple, “Do you want to sell sugar water or do you want to change the world?” But now, everyone selling sugar water actually thinks they are changing the world. That’s a problem—even in Silicon Valley, where not every company can be an Apple including, these days, Apple itself.

I encourage my fellow marketers to spend the next couple of months—I hope for all our sakes that it is just a couple of months—asking ourselves some uncomfortable questions about what kind of people we want to be, what kind of companies we want to work for, and what kind of legacies we want to leave.

As an example, Ally Bank just announced that it would not apply any customers’ stimulus checks to overdrafts. All customers will get the full amount to spend on luxuries like, you know, rent or food.

This is a branding initiative that actually means something. It’s not just empty words, catchy slogans, or hip cool imagery, although it might be promoted with those things.

I hope my colleagues, as they sit at home drinking wine and baking homemade sourdough cinnamon rolls, will take a moment to contemplate why Ally Bank would pull such a Miracle on 34th Street type move. And even more to the point, to consider why the whole system is so tied to quarterly earnings reports that long-term, customer-first thinking like this isn’t more common.

Then maybe we can have advertising, marketing, and branding that’s actually worth the effort it takes to produce.