Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Too Much Stuff

First of all there's this.

1. A few years ago I stopped worrying about keeping up with the latest in pop music because I realized that there was tons of stuff that I knew I loved that I hadn't listened to enough. There were James Brown songs I hadn't even heard of. There was John Coltrane and Mozart and the Beatles and the Fastbacks to explore. I figured that I had a limited time on Earth to enjoy the 1300+ hours of music I already owned (mostly on purpose) what was the upside to being stressed about missing out on the next big thing?

2. Thanks to TIVO, Netflicks, the Library and a distressing lack of time to waste I no longer watch anything on television that isn't brilliant.

3. A few years ago I discovered that people were donating nearly new, stylish clothing to Goodwill. I recently admired a Tommy Bahama shirt at the mall and then nearly choked when I saw that it cost $95. One day latter I bought nearly the same shirt, with pricetags, at Goodwill for $3.

4. In college I took Econ 101 and learned that in order for an economy to expand growth needs to accelerate. People need to buy more and more.

Put all these together and you get what we have. We have an economy that was driven by people buying more and more things and we reached a point where it became obvious to even the most oblivious (me) that there were already plenty of things...too much really...and there's no reason to keep buying stuff.

Thus we have a recession.

Oh wait, there's also the unbridled greed and stupidity in the Financial sector. That helped.

1 comment:

  1. Once again I'm in total agreement with you, so I don't have a burning need to comment, but I'm wondering what television you consider worth watching. I don't watch TV, but our library now gets old series on DVD, so I'm discovering stuff that way, as I pay attention to what circulates. That said, I'm always curious what I might be missing. I was thrilled to see that you are a BSG watcher. Season 4 obviously isn't available on DVD, so I patiently watch what is posted on the website sometimes in 15 second snippets as it slowly downloads. Truly pathological and pathetic, I know...

    ReplyDelete