Last Tuesday the Dutch Queen held her State of the Union (Prinsjesdag, ie Princes Day), in which she stated the Netherlands will hold their purchasing power in 2009 (pensions are privatized, currently at 158% coverage rate), and government will govern towards a budget surplus of 1.2% of GDP.
My point is: the pain that is felt by Americans today, has not reached the other side of the pond (yet).

But your story is the tale of someone hitting proverbial "rock bottom" and having to recover using new skills and foregoing all pleasures. At the most you might say you were addicted to the American dream, but aren't we all? We all press our purchases to the limit of our current income, and we all dress in the priestly robes of our profession. Things like HBO and Showtime on cable are small luxuries (though they do add up), so who can fault you for wanting a little enjoyment in life? You had arrived and you wanted to show it, and that is utterly American, as Thorstein Veblen pointed out over 100 years ago during the Gilded Age in his Theory of the Leisure Class - a book everyone should read and very slowly because it is packed with insights.

But you are not an alcoholic, and you do not have a disease, and your problems therefore are mostly from external circumstances beyond your control, relating to the collapse of the American dream. Yet the pain to you is precisely that of the fallen addict. Is that the lesson here? Is America like one giant addict, unable to wean itself from a "lifestyle" entirely inappropriate to its circumstances? Is our empire, largely invisible to Americans themselves, choking the life out of the country?

Are the new American pioneers those who have fled to Mexico or China or someplace less developed, to live in a world that is not yet plagued by material luxuries? Of course there is no such place - everyone wants to live like Americans used to - and Singaporeans have succeeded in their own way, of course. Nonetheless, someone is going to have to show Americans a different way of living, a middle way perhaps between extracting excessive amounts of the world's production, and living within limits everyone else has been forced to accept.

Maybe you are one of those pioneers, and there could be a really interesting book drawn from your past and current experiences.

Thank you S-P for the courage to share the learned lessons of life as you have thus lived it. Remember, that it's not what you HAVE or WANT but what you ARE that is important. What you ARE has impressed me these past few years of visiting this site as I do every time I fire up this 'puter. Peace.

I have a different story. I am the first in my family to move out of farming and the building trades to graduate from college (made possible only by the money that flowed, briefly, post-60's to bring non-ruling class kids to the table). Thanks to my working class roots and a bit of traveling and living in third world countries I came to perceive the consumptive American Dream as hollow, immoral and unsustainable.
I briefly worked a real job, saved virtually all the money and made a down payment on a farm in the midwest. I paid the farm off over a couple of decades with revenues from milking a small (60) herd of cows and raised a handful of kids.
We used to watch the rest of the US grow richer and richer in material things, everyone had new cars, satellite TV, then cable, cell phones, beautiful new clothes, snowmobiles, 4-wheelers, and maxed out credit. We paid off the farm, carried virtually no debt, and lived off the waste of a consumer society.
We did not have TV at all as we made the decision to insulate our kids from the consumerism it fostered (not to mention we all had way too much work to do on the farm to waste time with sit-coms).
We shopped at yard sales and lived like scavengers off of the discards of a consumer society gone mad.
At times we had moments of remorse feeling like we had missed some luxurious boat ride that everyone else was on while we stood on shore in our Carhartt coveralls.
My kids did not have the consumer wealth other kids did but they had a pair of draft ponies (Haflingers) they broke to drive and rake hay with. They had border collie puppies from good bloodlines that they trained to work the stock. They had a pond and a creek to mess around in. They had any pet they were willing to take care of, baby raccoons, abandoned killdeers, peacocks, baby woodchuck, guineas, pigeons, turtles, frogs, salamanders, baby lambs, kid goats, chicks of varied breeds, geese, ducks, cats galore, etc.
My kids are adults in a much poorer world than I came of age in. I don't think they will be able to live so affluently off of the discards as we did. I thought this would come sooner than it did but do not relish its appearance. This will be a difficult transition for people. We learned very slowly and made lots of mistakes.
The wealthy will struggle to keep their party going, even if they have to exclude most of us from the largess. This will not be pretty.

I've been checking the agonist more frequently the last few days to see how the current events would be construed. honestly, much of the economics is beyond me, but i wade through it to try to grasp the essential trends. but this post rang very clearly, as i've been recently interested in what constitutes well-being. interestingly, economists have their opinions (see daniel kahneman's book on hedonic happiness). he seems to have reduced it to pleasure and positive emotions experienced daily. i find this a troubling view--one that could easily lead to seeking your happiness through the consumption of extrinsic goods like money and social recognition. (Most psychologists assume the mind and body where rational processes regulate temperament based drives, buy even this sets up a dichotomy that is ultimately conflictual. In my opinion the most promise is in an integrated model in which reason is influenced by one's worldview, or schema; it is this intuitive structure that must be transformed, because it is what determines the "color" of thought--ok enough psychology).

what is interesting about the downsizing is how it forces one to live sparingly and seek value elsewhere. this has to happen. we can't continue consuming a quarter of the worlds resources, while the poorest among us starve (that is if our debt continues to be supported). it seems that if it doesn't happen voluntarily it will be forced upon us as Sean-Paul says.

while this will be ultimately healthy for the planet, it will certainly not be enjoyable to watch people struggling materially, emotionally, and spiritually as they sort through the human experience to finally realize that value comes from being pro-social and allocentric--not selfish and egocentric. This is the example that someone like Gandhi--who died technically worth a few dollars--left humanity; how could someone utterly penniless be such a profound example of well-being, and such a supreme example of humanity's ideal?
well like SP says, we all have a choice. and it looks like we can make it now, or have it made for us. but, humanity has always had good examples to look to in times of confusion who have shown that it is possible to live a coherent life in well-being in the service of others. but are people ready to give up the dream and start looking inside?

L.I. (Klaus Wennemann): "Boot ist nicht zu halten."

I was wondering when we'd hear about what happened over the last few years. I had no idea tings had gone so low for a while. Imagine people in your situation, but with 2 or 3 kids as well! Total disaster.
Regarding downsizing. I agree, one does not need "much". Of course, some people in Africa would consider what we call "not much" like total splurging. The big trap is the one in which you feel you have to have anything that your neighbors have, or more.

Living like other people is not a purely self-generated stupidity. I don't buy as much as most people (example -- I don't even have a designated long-distance carrier because it's cheaper to use a pre-paid phone card). And I have spent long, boring evenings with relatives exhorting me, "You ought to buy. . . ", complete with fulsome descriptions of how great their possessions are. The joys of consumerism are a common topic of small talk. When you are trying to persuade other people to give you a job, give you a raise, endorse the causes you advocate, or vote for the candidate you support, an Armani suit or its equivalent increases your credibility for a lot of people. We're social animals. Doing the things that the others in the society do is part of creating and enjoying the social bond. There is a cost to not doing so.

Obviously, I wish everyone would live less materialistic lifestyles, so I wouldn't seem like such an outrider, but I think this is another instance of setting up society in one way and berating individuals for not doing things in another way. And S-P, I don't mean this was a berating post -- thanks for writing it. We're on the verge of hearing how the current crisis came about because we were all too greedy on an individual level. Since it was everybody's fault, the people at the top who looted the system aren't really responsible. They earned their golden parachutes.

Reason not the need.
-- King Lear

An article worth reading in this month’s Walrus Magazine The Business of Saving the Earth

Last paragraph of the article, “I am coming to understand that my place in the garden is only as secure as the serpent’s.” My comment after reading all eight pages, "Wisdom takes a long time to develop, mistakes are part of the process."

...placed almost 10 years later, and in a more sales-related field (I left sales for Technical Support by 1990).

It's hard sometimes to recognise needs versus wants...and yeah, high-speed internet can be seen as a want, depending on your usage. It doesn't help that our culture (especially in the past 8-10 years) has been pushed steadily deeper into consumerism and the 'ownership society', where a man's measure is in what he has, not what/who he is, or what he's doing/done.

I let myself get sucked into that--I've always been something of a gadget-man, wanting the latest personal productivity tools (Palm/Treo, then iPhone, bluetooth, laptop, home wireless network, you get the picture). Trying, paycheck to paycheck, to allocate funds to paying bills, then seeing what's left over for food and gas, really adds to the household's stress level. It helped kill my first marriage, and certainly isn't helping things in my second.

All we can do is our best, and only age and experience can really help in seeing & avoiding the spiraling death-traps laying in wait for us, that would suck us dry once again.

-5.75,-4.05
"God gives men a brain and a penis, and only enough blood to run one at a time." -- Robin Williams

Those who know how to live frugally are rich.

_{"While not a Playboy reader, she invites a male acquaintance in for a quiet discussion of Chagall, Nietzsche, jazz, sex." - not a Hugh Hefner quote}

for keeping the Agonist going through all that.

I am truly astonished that all that was happening...and you kept up The Agonist. Must be Divine Order.

I cannot express enough what a real lifeline it was for me to discover The Agonist at the time of the heartbreak and crushing pain of the invasion and to have so many great minds at my disposal for the perusing...a gift beyond price. I still use much of what i've learned, and my main understanding of so much has come from right here...

the Flamefest, Warthog, Evenmore, Marek, all the regulars from all over the world who were here...it was grand.

We've changed, but so much the better for it.

Deepest thanks.

Re: Downsizing: My mantra is, Shore up all your relationships. You'll need them.

1700: "Abolish slavery!"
1800: Woman's Suffrage!"
2000:"World Peace!"

http://webofdebt.wordpress.com/monetary-proposal/

I'm actually a trust fund baby, as I get about $70 a quarter from the estate of a great grandfather who was prez of Wells Fargo back in the late 19th century. Other than that, I'm pushing 50 and still riding horses for a living.

School was trade school for desk work and I couldn't imagine spending my life at a desk.

Emergency Program of Monetary Reform for the United States

There is no earthly reason why the Bank of Canada couldn’t lend its own government very, low, interest loans if commercial banks were made once again to hold reserves on deposits with no interest going to the private banks, held by the Bank of Canada, which relieves the tax payers from paying high interest on debt. The money could be used to support infrastructure across the nation.

SP,

Thanks so much for laying it out there. I too, like many at this moment, have been going through a reflective period of deep self (re)examination. While I haven't contributed here in some time, I still check in daily. Thanks to you and everyone else here who "keep it real" while nurturing this thing along.

Best,

Stuart

Being Flooded, Letting Go

Thank you for remaining such a gracious blog host during such a difficult time. The Agonist is a very special place. To foster this unique blog while you were falling on such hard times is truly remarkable.