Great Expectations

Along with everyone else I keep reading "positive" news on the economy reported by the mass media. Pretty consistently now "a slowing of a decline" is cheered as a sign, well, of... growth! But all this means is that we are still falling into the abyss, only the rate of our falling has slowed down a bit - maybe we bounced off the wall with a little upward movement before continuing our free fall, or met some rising stream of air.

Housing news are seriously cheered by the newsmakers. The sales of new homes rose 3% in July compared to that of June! Never mind that it is still well below what it used to be a year ago when, as real estate professionals, we were looking at each other and saying: "The market is dead." Never mind that it is 3 TIMES less than what is used to be at its peak in 2006.

Well, yes, some number of houses will always be sold no matter what the economy, and at some point job losses will come almost to a standstill because there may be no more jobs to lose.

A friend of mine runs a small company, and an employee of hers recently opined that "thank goodness, we have already hit the bottom." She asked him why he thought this was the case. He said that it was because it became so bad that it CAN'T possibly get any worse: people barely have money to pay for their mortgages, gas and food. My friend is originally from Russia, and she could only stare at him in disbelief after such a statement. A person who has a 4 bedroom, 2 bathroom home, 2 cars and eats out periodically thinks it cannot get any worse? Why? Just because we are Americans, and nothing bad can happen to us? Seriously?

I realize that it is the "American way" to not lose optimism. But feeding people false hopes of a soon forthcoming recovery is irresponsible, in my mind. We are in this recession for the long run, we need to be prepared to run an exhausting marathon, not use up all our resources to survive a short sprint. We need to adjust our habits, expectations, likes and dislikes. We need to learn to curb our wasteful lifestyles. The orgies of consumption we witnessed in 1990s are not coming back, and - good riddance! But to adjust to the new world, to learn to not only survive in it, but to enjoy and appreciate it, we need to switch our mentality from: "OK, just one more push, and this nightmare is going to be over, and life will be back to normal." Life is not going to be back to "normal", because it was not normal before. I think our world has changed for good. And for the good, too. Our preoccupation with material success, with money as the only measure of a person's worth, our unbridled consumerism, our self-centeredness will hopefully be seriously compromised as a result of this cleansing crisis. And the media is doing all of us a disservice in setting the expectations that the return to our old ways is just around the corner.