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by kvonhorn
864 days ago
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> I feel something is getting horribly out of balance In my country, they dropped interest rates to near 0 in the wake of 9/11 in order to prevent the economy from crashing, and held them there until the Covid pandemic. It seems like that free money was used to buy _anything_ that could be invested in, driving up prices for assets like stocks, houses, and cryptocurrencies. I remember reading articles around 2018 that said that economists didn't know how the economy worked anymore. The crazy low, long term interest rates are what _I_ feel has been freaky about the economy since at least 2005 when I looked at a dark, unremarkable 4 bedroom condominium priced at $400k, which was at least 6x my annual income. It's felt like a huge house of cards has been built for over 20 years now, the whole economy outside of the service sector has been hollowed out, and I'm still waiting for it to all come crashing down. |
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I suspect, people, even with comparatively high income, stopped being able to buy hard securities like houses. Why save up then? So, folk had a lot more "disposable income" to consume soothing, but overall transient consumable products and services like clothing, tech gadgets, food, subscriptions... – lifestyle stuff. You know: 1000$ sneakers and a 12$/month meditation app. A bit of luxury and the illusion of wealth. This in turn enabled an industry of bullshit pushers, who started manufacturing the demand for all these consumables, trying to reap a new massive YOLO market. All, of course, paying their 20% to the 1%.
Rents and living costs kept rising, so now we got to the point where "luxury" has become cheap, cheap lookalike instead, and most everybody is hustling to keep their "standard of living". Multiple jobs and a side gig, to pay for the fix and all your subscriptions... no pension, no pause. Ever.
> "You'll own nothing and be happy"
Look at the housing crisis and get all academic about the economy... What terrifies me, is this new, omnipresent private sell-out and monetization of social interactions. Everybody always has something to sell, is self-branding. Everybody wants to get in my head constantly, stomp their shit between my dopamine receptors. Too often, I feel exhausted and physically sick from this dynamic, I feel the sick. Decency and respect had their IPO.
And I am carrying a new generalized anger with me everywhere, which I see in fellow strangers, too. People are increasingly short-fused. The pandemic accelerated this. Traffic is mad.
I fear the fabric of the collective is on sale at this moment. Maybe the mandated growth dogma has hit the capacity of healthy attention or something. This is not just an economic bubble, but the exhaustion of a part human along with it. Someone is getting high on their own supply...