Upside of the Down

Is there an upside to the recession that may be bearing down on us? A recent essay in New York Magazine makes the case, albeit sort of badly.

There's obviously not much to look forward to during a recession, but I was hoping that writer Joel Lovell would look for bright bits in the fact that it might inspire people to once again realize that you don't need a Viking range to be happy, and that thrift can be sorta sexy. After all, isn't the true meaning of "cool" all about making a dollar out of a nickel? (I stole that from somebody else, btw.)

But mostly he spends his time bitching about the current high price of cheese, skyrocketing home prices, and how poor he feels compared to the other yuppies that have moved into his Brooklyn neighbourhood.

He's aware of the fact that he's overly smitten with the desire to own all the same shiny things the moneyed folks do, but not enough to stop talking about it throughout the entire article. Still, there are a few gems, such as the one below, that make it worth reading:

Is there a moment you can point to when you thought, Things aren’t like they used to be?” She contemplated. “I guess it was the personal juicer,” she said.

She was referring to our friend’s boss at an Internet start-up, a guy who got paid ten gajillion dollars about fifteen minutes after he started his company and then went bananas. Among various eccentricities he hired a Rastafarian to travel everywhere with him and make him juice.