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ResourcesVisa & Immigration LawVisa NewsIt Is Always Darkest Before the Dawn...

It Is Always Darkest Before the Dawn...

Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video would suggest, we are discussing the notion that “it is always darkest before the dawn”. Why would I make this video? This is more one of those op-ed pieces I do from time to time.

Here recently, especially the last week, many of the media outlets that we generally come across in our discussions in making these videos, it has been pretty somber stuff. Just as a for example, we found this via the Thai Visa website, thaivisa.com, it is titled: TAT Chief admits it could be THREE YEARS Before Thai Tourism is Back to Normal. They are quoting Tourism of Thailand Governor Yuthasak Suphasorn and this apparently initially appeared in comments in the Bangkok Insight but it is quoted by Thai Visa. Quoting directly from the article: "He said that it would be 2 to 3 years before Thailand's tourism sector was back to anything like normal. He said that he expects foreigners to start coming again by mid-year but not fully." Then they go into a lot of somber news. I have seen this across a lot of different news outlets so it is not just Thai Visa. I am not pointing them out but I thought that this interview with the tourism authorities here was noteworthy. People are pretty despondent and I totally get it. My thoughts go out to those folks especially who are in the tourism industry. It is tough. We have got a lot of clients that have been going through a lot and certainly our hearts and prayers are with them. The situation is not good. But back in the summer, and I was even guilty of this, I thought things were going to snap back to some level of normality much more quickly than ultimately proved to be the case. You can go back and watch videos from like June, we were talking about “well by the end of the year we are going to be able to do this and that,” well that has come and gone and that has proven to have been a far more overly optimistic assessment then it otherwise should have been. 

There is a more fundamental phenomenon going on here and one can call it what I would call "normalcy bias" perhaps compounded by what is often called “confirmation bias.” What I am talking about here and not to get too deep into this, I am not no great mass psychological thinker, but what I think we are seeing is when things start looking a certain way, people start presuming that is the way things are just going to be. So if things are going real great, if happy days are rolling along, people presume that is just the way it is. It is happy days from here on and nothing is really going to change that. Then unfortunately events come along and disturb that and things change. Meanwhile, I am kind of a natural, I hesitate to say pessimist, but I think part of my profession and part of the way my outlook works is I have said this many times on this channel "hope for the best but plan for the worst" and I have spent a career basically planning for the worst in many circumstances. So it is actually kind of difficult for me to reverse course because for years when things were going well I was sitting there “well prepare for a rainy day” and people perhaps said I was probably being overly pessimistic and under certain circumstances that may very well have been true. 

What I am trying to get across in this video is "yes things are not great, especially in the tourism sector and yes it is going to take time to dig out of this but it is always darkest before the dawn. I am not sure we are at the darkest moment yet but things always change. The one constant is change and I just cannot imagine that things could tick along at this pace forever. We could have some more time to wait before things start to really turn a corner but I am hopeful and I think there is reason to be hopeful that things will turn a corner sooner rather than later and we will see things starting to turn around or starting to go in a more positive direction and hopefully we will see that in this calendar year. As they noted in that article I cited, by the end of the year we are hoping to see some return in tourism. We are quite a ways out from that and that could definitely happen in the amount of time we are looking at as of the making of this video.

We will keep you updated as things progress. I am certainly not trying to be foolishly optimistic but I think now is the time to reflect on the fact that and myself included we may have been overly optimistic and perhaps a little bit more realism would have called for being a little bit more pessimistic back 6-8 months ago. Perhaps now it is time to kind of shift gears a little bit, say “hey things can't stay bad forever. Things can and often will and in fact it has been proven throughout time, again the only constant is change.”