TOBY SHAPSHAK: Give your mental health a break

I found myself in the bizarre situation last weekend of defending Eskom CEO André de Ruyter. "Give him a chance," I heard myself say more than once. My wife quite rightly asked me if I was feeling unwell or had been taken by the body snatchers.

I’m as angry as every other South African — except, perhaps, the smug Matshela Koko — about the sudden resurgence of load-shedding. On top of everything else we’re forced to survive during lockdown, it seems to add a Zuma-esque insult to our injury.

But, if the past three months have taught me anything, it is to worry about the things you can do something about. My main responsibility is to keep my own little business running, so that my business partner, Sally Hudson, and I can continue to support the eight households that depend on an income from Stuff.

Like the rest of the (small business-owning) world, it has truly never been harder to do business. A wise friend, who has a full-time job at a big corporate and whose salary hasn’t been cut, told me the businesses which survive will be stronger than ever and go on to great things. It’s the usual survival-of-the-fittest economic Darwinism, with the slight twist that the entire world’s economy is melting. Just surviving is enough for me.

I’ll be happy to make it to the end of the year. By then, it seems that the traditional consumer spending surge — which we call Christmas — will come back. It won’t be as lavish as in previous years, nor will the window displays. But the last three months of the year are when shoppers do the bulk of their consumer electronics, and other, shopping.

If the past three months have taught me anything, it is to worry about the things you can do something about

Like all the other "novel coronavirus pandemic" predictions, especially anything said by our own government, mine has no scientific basis. But I am hoping that some form of traditional behaviour — and a brutalised world will feel like it deserves a present — will kick-start something in the global economy. Big companies that have cut back on marketing spend during this dark winter will spend again with vigour, I tell myself. As we go into another round of hard lockdown — no booze and a curfew, how much harder can it get? — the litany of things to make a small business owner fume will increase.

Meanwhile, the sectors that have managed to exert some strange pressure on the government (churches, which rely on tithes, and the indomitable taxi industry) will continue as if they live in the non-Covid-19 parallel universe half of our cabinet inhabits.

So instead of losing my cool over the instantly infuriating Eskom outage, or the madness of the cabinet’s thoroughly illogical decisions, I’m taking the path less stressful and focusing on the things that are within my power to do something about. All three of them. My attitude, my mental health, and my sense of humour.

Until the next Eskom blackout, that is, and I have to turn on the generator, the real sound of SA’s new dawn.