It's Sunday, a day of rest, and my lack of resting has brought back a blog I wanted to write last week.

Last Friday was Black Friday. Before coming to the U.S. I had never heard this term since it's not used in Canada. For those of you who don't know, Black Friday is the day after American Thanksgiving when the official Christmas shopping season begins. Why black? Because it's often the holiday season that brings most retailers accounting balances out of the red and into the black.

This holiday season, the American public are supposedly planning on spending less over the Christmas holidays. This idea of less spending is being greeted with reactions of doom and gloom, since many fear less spending will lead the U.S. into a recession and eventually much worse.

With consumer spending accounting for about three-quarters of U.S. economic activity, some economists say it is inevitable that the economy will stop growing at some point in the coming year, for the first time since the mild recession of 2001. “Right now, the question is how bad it’s going to get,” said David Rosenberg, chief North American economist at Merrill Lynch. “The question is one of magnitude.”

Others are more direct. Nouriel Roubini, an economics professor at New York University who has been predicting the collapse of the housing bubble for years, wrote recently that not only is a recession inevitable, he also sees “the risk of a severe and worsening liquidity and credit crunch leading to a generalized meltdown of the financial system of a severity and magnitude like we have never observed before.”

Excerpt: From Black Friday to Black Recession, by Costa Tsiokos - Population Statistic

My angle on all this talk of economic downturns, slowdowns and other doomsday scenarios is actually quite optimistic, economic slowdown can be seen as a good thing. Our drive for growth and our drive to make and spend money has so many negative repercussions. These days it seems we spend all our time in pursuit of the almighty dollar, and as a result, less time paying attention to what truly matters. Lost in a daze of compliant corporate citizens we are oblivious to the direction we are traveling and the seriousness of our impending situation.

The solution to the problems of global warming, environmental degradation, fossil fuel shortages, and our debt-ridden economic house of cards all lie in doing more with less, and in slowing everything down. We need to take the time thus providing a temporal space in which we can all use our greatest evolutionary gift, adaptation.

We may be spending their money, but they're spending our time.

Imagine a world where our time is more valuable than money.

In this world we work less, but in working less we have more time to think about the consequences of our actions. In thinking about the consequences of our actions, our priorities begin to shift, we have time to connect to our children, time to grow food or connect to local energy efficient food sources, and most important, time to connect to what we really need to become fulfilled... not very much at all.

I would argue that most of the 'stuff' on sale this Christmas, on a net basis, will actually make us more miserable than we already are.

Hmmmm, I'm clearly a naive optimist with a utopia-view of what could be... the reality is most of us don't care about connecting to our children, our food, or what's really going on. Instead we're driven to connect to the mall so we can then connect our new plasma-screen TV.

And it's obvious that before we can reach this utopia vision of reality, a recession would result in suffering because our current model doesn't enable adaptive responses. And this is the point, by ignoring adaptation we're choosing a road that is not going to be easy. We need to be more proactive and we need to do it NOW.

And if its bad, people will go hungry and children will suffer and there will be disease and depression and violence before we come out the other side. In the article I posted last week James Lovelock is predicting six billion people dead in the next forty years! Now maybe he's off by a long shot, but leading scientists seem to be saying the same thing, we're in DEEP shit! So what the hell are we all working towards a new plasma-screen TV for?

“They bank on your apathy, they bank on your willful ignorance … How can you enjoy the good life when Rome is burning?” - Lions for Lambs

In the end hopefully we come out better off and freed from this archaic system imprinted on us by the industrial revolution, now far outdated. There are no easy answers, and I do recognize that we can't just go from here to there without some growing pains. But one thing I know for certain, I'm not on-board with SHOP TILL YOU DROP...

peace,
d