Already this year, we’ve started to see the unfortunate fallout of the global financial meltdown. Companies laying off workers, regular Americans losing their homes and regular people beginning to move to tent cities. Additionally, with taxes shrinking, local governments are struggling to meet their increased obligations of unemployment insurance checks and social services that rise in times like these: homelessness and mental health. To put it bluntly, there a precious few positive side effects of a global recession.
Unfortunately, I’m an extrovert. What that means is that I feed off the energy of others. Therefore, when people are happy, I feel happy and when they’re bummed out and hopeless, I feel a strong motivation to cheer them up. I’m also an optimist because it’s the only outlook that has ever made sense to me. This is a blog post about good things that I see that will emerge from the Recession. Perhaps these observations are just glib words — on the other hand, we’re equipped with all the tools to turn ideas into action. I recently heard Desmond Tutu say, “Language creates the reality it seeks to describe.” If you agree with my ideas here, please forward this to a friend so we can collectively create a better reality.
We have all watched the business press cover sales trends for the holidays and seen firsthand the deep discounting going on at retailers. What I found more fascinating were the changes in attitude and behavior that took place around me this year. One of the parents at my son’s pre-school offered us a few boxes of books and clothes that his children had outgrown. At first, I politely refused, largely out of pride. When my wife heard the story, she chastised me and when we saw the parent next, we accepted. This might be an isolated example except for the fact that it made a deep impression on us. And we realized that we also have boxes of beautiful clothes in the basement and friends that could use them.
Perhaps more importantly, we altered our attitude on Hannukah and Christmas gifts. While we still overbought, you could see everyone making an effort to be more thoughtful in their purchases. This really stood out for me as a healthy move away from a trend of spending to convey love while simultaneously showering more and more people with less and less attention (I’m not only talking about Twitter here. . . .)
If our behavior is any indicator of national trends, we’re going to see disappointing Holiday sales figures released soon. But here’s why this may not be all bad.
What is the Economy? At it’s simplest (meaning when we’re not double hedging Mortgage Derivatives), it is simply the way we keep score. Of what? Theoretically, the economy keeps score of the value we create (spending and savings) relative to the value we take (spending and debt). So what does that mean?
Well, for me it means that there’s going to be a lot of bad news in the days and months to come. And most of it will be in areas that you and I cannot control, which can really make you feel hopeless and powerless. But we’re not — we’re powerful and more so, the more we have hope and trust in eachother. Because the economy is a reflection of us all — how well we create value and help eachother.
Which leads me, I think to my point. One thing we can control, is how we each behave. The behavior that I saw this Holiday season is stuff that won’t show up on the economic report card, We spent less, but hopefully, we paid more attention to the people around us, and valued them more. The two concepts, spending and supporting, are interrelated but not equivalent. So lets create value and support eachother. Inspire eachother. Invest in eachother. That’s the way value has and always will be created. And we need it now, more than ever.
