For the Wall Street Journal yesterday Peggy Noonan mentioned a Michigan family that, “under financial pressure, decided to give up credit cards, satellite television, high-tech toys and restaurant dining, to live on a 40-acre farm and become more self-sufficient.” The story originally ran in USA Today:
The paper weirdly headlined them “economic survivalists,” which perhaps reflected an assumption that anyone who leaves a conventional, material-driven life for something more physically rigorous but emotionally coherent is by definition making a political statement. But it didn’t look political from the story they told. They didn’t look like people trying to figure out how to survive as much as people trying to figure out how to live. …
Actually it sounds pretty much like my childhood; I’m sure many people — if not most — would relate.
I’ll keep my computer and my cell phone (which is desparately due for an upgrade to something more robust) thank you very much, but if you made a serious inventory of all of our expenses — not financial expenses, but things that cost us our time and attention — and try to articulate exactly what all that gets us, it’s stunning to imagine the extend of the winding-down that might occur…
Some of this—the desire to live less expensively, and perhaps with greater simplicity—seems to key off what I am seeing in Manhattan, a place still generally with more grievances than grief, and with a greater imagination about how badly things are going to go than how bad it is right now. Many think that no matter how much money is sloshing through the system from Washington, creating waves that lead to upticks, the recession is really a depression. We won’t “come out of it,” as the phrase goes, for five or seven years, because the downturn is systemic, global, and because the old esprit is gone. The baby boomers who for 40 years, from 1968 through 2008, did the grunt work of the great abundance—work was always a long-haul trip for them, they were the first in the office in 1975 and are the last to leave the office to this day—know the era they built is over, that something new is beginning, something more subdued and altogether more mysterious. The old markers of success—money, status, power—will not quite apply as they have. They watch and work as the future emerges.
The article is here. Most of the rest of it seems far-fetched to me — except for the interesting fact pointed out (I think G. Harrison would like this one) that sales of vegetable seeds are apparently way up over last year… gotta love the countercyclical assets.
photo by tizianoj
Update: check out the story, via Yglesias, about part of Japan’s stimulus efforts being to encourage agricultural work:
Many young Japanese, for their part, have shown a growing interest in farming as disillusionment rises over the grind of city jobs and layoffs.
But as one leek farmer pointed out:
“You can’t learn farming in just a year, or even several years. It’s a lifetime profession,” he said. “I worry this is just a fad. I’m worried that when the economy picks up, they’ll all flock back to the city.”
That’s warranted skepticism. As long as our responses to the crisis are merely more fads, we’ll keep making things more difficult for ourselves.
How can we tell if we’re actually getting to the ‘root’ of our problems?
