The economy seems to picking up. Work is busier than it has been in almost 2 years. Orders are coming in better than forecasts and the hourly workers are getting plenty of overtime. I can see in the stores as well, more people shopping. People also seem to be a bit more optimistic about the future as well. We are not out of the woods yet, but, as long as this is not a double dip recession, I think we will be ok. I have been getting more calls from headhunters aka recruiters as well.
I have to agree with my wife, you can only go so long cutting people and inventory before things have to be ordered and building has to start again. That being said, I don’t think the real estate market is going to bounce back for a long time, if ever. I think the boom of the early ’00′s was a one time bubble, and it really can’t be repeated. We just can’t afford to have homes go up 20% a year with incomes going up 3%. I wish the recovery was faster, but we are dealing with trillions of dollars of debt accumulated over a long time. People are scared of spending money, but, you eventually have no choice. You can only patch stuff together for so long. Most people who have a job now will probably have still have a job in the foreseeable future.
I feel bad for all the people laid off. I would pursue the headhunters more, but there are other people out there who are out of a job. I actually like my job, and more money would not make my life that much happier (as strange as that sounds.) I really do believe, once you get over the $50,000 to $60,000 mark, the extra money does not buy happiness. Some of the happiest moments of my life were when I was making half of what I am now.
I really do believe things are picking up, but whomever thought Obama would be a magic man and make the economy turn around in months, not years, was deluding themselves. I know it is going to take a while. We just have to very careful not to create another bubble, or we will end up in 2008 all over again. I just know 2 solid years of recession is a long time. I also feel more hopeful about the year ahead than in the last 2 years.
A society of hoarders
A fascinating show on television is called Hoarders. It details the lives of people who go beyond just a messy house, and where stuff takes over peoples’ lives. At first, I thought, maybe this was just an exception to how people live, but a recent trip to an antique store made me think it may run deeper than that.
In just about any antique store (I admit it, I really like going to antique stores) and you will see the following:
Safety Razor blades, in their original containers.
Boxes for food, not made for decades.
Sealed containers for pop, decades past it’s prime, unopened.
Boxed toys, never played with.
Medicine, still in containers, that would probably kill you if you tried them,
Tins, boxes, and used containers of all sorts.
Huge assortments of clothes from the last 80 years.
Why were these items not thrown out? They served no more useful purpose. Why keep an empty box of Ritz Crackers from 1964? I think the answer is, as a society, we have a really hard time throwing things away. I totally understand why furniture is in antique stores, it was designed to last for decades or even centuries, but razor blades? They were meant to used and thrown away. Why buy a toy, and never play with it? I can understand keeping the box if you want to keep it safe when you are not using it, but never opening it? I guess there are some really young collectors out there. I hope this is the case.
As Americans, we treasure our stuff. We hate getting rid of it because we paid money for it, and it sometimes has an emotional attachment. I find myself guilty of this as well. A personal story: For years I had 2 or 3 LARGE boxes full of cables and random electronics. I could not get rid of all those cables, dongles, and boxes of unknown usefulness. With cleaning up the basement, I finally got the nerve to start tossing cables. It took 3 rounds, but I am finally down to one, fairly small box of cables. In that box, everything in there is useful. All that outdated technology is gone. I was never going to need 20 RCA cables or an amplifier for a phonograph. It was really hard to admit that and just toss the crap out. This was just a few boxes in my basement. Try this times 120,000,000 households and you can see how antique stores and eBay are so well stocked.
Why do we treasure our stuff so much? I really don’t want to point the finger at our consumer society, but I don’t what else to blame. It has afflicted us with a need to accumulate stuff and make it nearly impossible to get rid of it, unless you are dead. I have a hunch about 95% of the stock of antique stores is estate objects. I still want to know how many broaches were made between 1910 and 1960. I am guessing about 2 billion. Buy, why did the dead keep these things? This can’t be a recent thing, since so many of the objects out there are decades old. Is it a post WWII thing? Post Depression? I am guessing the Great Depression really made people hold onto their things beyond their useful life and they passed those habits to their children. My Mother in Law was definitely affected in this way as well. Though, one has to wonder, how much of it is what your parents taught you and how much of it is what commercial messages are? I am not an anthropologist or psychologist, but if there are any readers out there who are, why do we keep these things?
Posted by admin on February 5, 2010 in General Comments
Leave a comment