Oh, It’s Tuesday: Missing The Great Recession

So some analysts are predicting that this recession might be over by the end of the year. I have no idea if that’s true. Listening to constant lay-off, business-closing, and bankruptcy-filing news on NPR and seeing tons of needed California programs get cut left and right, I don’t see how things could possibly get better by December. But I’m no economic expert, so of course, as always, we’ll see.

Photo by Daniel Y. Go

But say this isn’t just wishful-thinking and we are out of the recession before 2010, I thought this fun Gawker piece nicely introduced the subject of what we might miss about The Great Recession.

As someone who was both philosophically and necessarily anti-materialism during the last few economic booms, I have to say that the recession hasn’t been all gloom and doom. Five benefits:

1) People have begun saving more.

2) More people are learning how to spend and use their money better.

3) People have pretty much stopped making fun of people with anti-material values. Basically, “cheap” is the new “wise.”

4) It seems to me that more people are pursuing their dreams and looking into improving the quality, as opposed to the quantity of their lives.

5) The next generation might not have this problem. The baby boomers were maybe understandably turned off by the extreme costs-saving ways of their Depression-era parents. Then they got hit by the learning curve-heavy forces of credit cards, changing company values, and retirement planning. The children of The Great Recession will probably be taught values like saving, living within your means, and how to use credit wisely from the jump, and that alone seems like it might be worth the price of this recession.

Still, I’ll be happy to see this recession behind us and the unemployment rates dropping. I just hope that we’ll be able to carry the lessons that we learned during The Great Recession into 2010.