For a generation that has been on the "go" since the last fifteen plus years and in its onward march of technological progression and constantly looming terrorist threats, a recession is hardly desirable, both as a matter of speech-because of the power of self-fulfilling prophecy-and as a matter of the substantive discomforts: who wants to work even harder just to get, say a tenth of what used to be easily available? I don't think our psyches are shaped to crave for work let alone hard work. Even our bodies have evolved only to indulge in the hedonistic pleasures of life. Answer this to yourselves: would you prefer to run five miles in thirty minutes or would you prefer to order pizza, sit in a couch and watch your choice of show on the television for thirty minutes munching Dorritos till the pizza is delivered?
Somewhere sometime the era of free money has to end. Even the most primitive ecosystems experience corrective mechanisms after periods of excessive growths. Aren't forest fires beneficial to forests? Yes, trees get burnt and die taking down entire ecosystems but a recession won't kill us but leave us a little less hopeful and force us to work even harder. The fatalistic downside analogies of a forest fire do not match up; the upside analogies do. To be fair I am neither a pessimist nor a sadist who forecasts doom-and-gloom and revel in the misery of the human condition. Nonetheless a sober assessment of the benefits of recession can make us stand aplomb and face a recession with certitude; moreover the ill effects of a recession may not render us as despondent as it is made out to be in our minds and TV talk shows.
What good can be gained out of a bad thing as a recession? First and foremost, a severe recession will not only be a test of our wallet size and wealth status but will test our integrity and moral compass, individually and collectively. If many of us loose our jobs will we behave differently? Will we become more helpful or will we become sympathetic towards someone committing a theft? Will societies start cleaving as the rich hoard leaving the wage monkeys desperate and mutinous? Will the rich start display tough love, asking you and me to serve as their nannies and cab drivers for dollars and cents? What happens matters: when you stare at the depth of abyss and it stares back at you, then, and only then, will you reveal your true character. What is true for individuals will be on display for societies under severe recessionary conditions.
What will happen to us if our incomes were to drop? Our hard work will be asked to testify in different aspects of our lives. The first thing that will go out of our consumptive radars are those goods and services that are income driven opulence: you crimp on spending for an extra pair of shoes or skip buying Armani suit or postpone buying a mega-sized Television as you learn to enjoy with what you have; you order less of pizza and cook more at home; your family invariably ends up gathering on the dinner table and not learn about each other through Facebook or Twitter or SMS messages; you take your family to exercise at the neighboring park rather than to Disney and see obesity levels dropping and self-healthcare replacing dependence on company provided healthcare; and rest of the summer you teach them things at home as you learn new skills yourselves; to go places you will use the most economic transportation be it small cars or public transportation or cycles or a good walk; you meet more people like you, both in your community and elsewhere and you start connecting. We might end up living like a true community and less married to the twenty hour work life of a big corporation.
What all will we learn as a society? Will we learn to experience the toils of sweat and blood to earn money as opposed to riding the chicanery of pump-and-dump? Will we learn how to generate real wealth or wallow in forlorn thoughts about how easily money used to be available once upon a time? Will we work even harder and more efficiently to generate genuine wealth and improvements versus day trading with each passing minute and gaming everyone's minds as to whether the next tick will be green or red? Will we work to generate tangible material benefits for the society as opposed to creating esoteric and heavily footnoted contracts, play poker games with borrowed money and see it all vaporized in a whisker's time? Will we learn about the real wealth of our society?
A long recession will likely purge the excesses of free money economics, strip down the mystery of leveraged returns, bring down the individual and collective hubris, slow down our restless minds, relax our overworked selves, awaken our complacent minds, force us to learn different skills and trades, challenge our creativity, exhibit and experience the goodness of fellow humans, and let us learn an invaluable lesson to teach our next generation. Keep a log of your travails: at the end of the recession you could write a book that becomes the best seller.
Goodbye splurging and welcome recession.
