Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness (which everyone doesn’t have to read but you definitely do need to know) blogs for nytimes.com:
Money matters and today most of us have less of it, so no one will be surprised by new survey results from the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index showing that Americans are smiling less and worrying more than they were a year ago, that happiness is down and sadness is up, that we are getting less sleep and smoking more cigarettes, that depression is on the rise.
The point of his post is that it isn’t actually declines in wealth that are depressing — at least not so much — as it’s about the uncertainty that things might get worse:
Why would we prefer to know the worst than to suspect it? Because when we get bad news we weep for a while, and then get busy making the best of it. We change our behavior, we change our attitudes. We raise our consciousness and lower our standards. We find our bootstraps and tug. But we can’t come to terms with circumstances whose terms we don’t yet know. An uncertain future leaves us stranded in an unhappy present with nothing to do but wait.
Now remember this?:
Once we admit these circumstances aren’t just “the worst since” the last depression but will actually become a historic depression in its own right, we don’t have to be so frightened by “staring into an abyss”; we can start to appreciate that we’re already in that abyss and it isn’t really that bad. The future has always been uncertain. The overarching lesson of all this is that we’ve been projecting rosy assumptions into an unknowable future; now we’re finally being honest but we’re not equipped to handle what we can’t see.
I’m gonna keep writing stuff like that until people finally lose their silly faith-in-optimism (“green shoots!”) so we can start to have serious discussions about where our assumptions might be flawed — starting with some of the factors pointed in the Globe & Mail’s interview with Merill Lynch’s chief North American economist, David Rosenberg:
We have the first consumer recession in the United States where the median age of the boomer is 52. The last time we had a [mild] consumer recession in 1990, the median boomer age was 34. They were still buying refrigerators and cars and microwave ovens. What’s happening right now is that the boomer is going to his or her financial adviser and seeing two pieces of paper that scare them to death – their net worth statement and life expectancy table.
Let’s turn to the other big shock, labour. You don’t like what you see when you delve deep into the U.S. data, do you?
There are very disturbing trends. In lockstep with letting people go, companies have also been cutting people’s hours at almost a record rate. The 33.2-hour [U.S. average] workweek is at a record low.
And it goes on…
