Every few weeks it strikes me. The master plan. The way to bypass the system, become autonomous, and live happily ever after. The log cabin in the woods, the abandoned nuclear missile silo, the converted shipping container, etc., etc.
I’m an idiot.
It’s not that the plans wouldn’t work, necessarily. Some have a great deal of merit, and in the hands of someone else could be very useful. But they overlook one very plain fact: I am suburban.
I don’t know when it happened. I grew up in the country, but not the hardcore country. We didn’t grow our own food or give directions like “turn left on the dirt road after the rusted tractor wheel,” but we did have 3 acres and a barbed-wire fence. Mind you, we only moved there after spending my first 10 years in a suburb of Fort Worth, so maybe the seed got planted early on.
Upon leaving college in that small country town, I moved to Fort Worth and have thenceforth lived in cities or suburbs. Nothing illogical about that, my clerical skill set has a hard time making money in the sticks. And I only developed that skill set en route to pursuing artistic fulfillment, the routes for which generally exist in and around cities. 14 years in that environment, however lower class, have structured my standards for livability.
It’s not just a housing thing. Try as I may, it seems I cannot live on less than $1,000 per week. Granted, a portion of that goes to city-level rent and utilities, but a surprising amount of it is used for what we call pocket money. I buy the most expensive coffee, I pick up new books in hardcover, I choose big-name groceries over cheapo store brands, and I drive a new car. Mind you, it’s bottom-of-the-line and the only car our three-member family has, but it’s not the hunka junka that a truly frugal person would drive (although an argument could be made for the savings in repairs, yaddah, yaddah).
I have this impression of the level of life I should be having in my mid-30s, and I live as close to it as my budget will allow. It’s a nationwide problem, evidenced by the vast industry of beyond-your-means lending that has been groaning, and now fracturing, under the weight of my generation’s unrealistic expectations. Most of us will not have the financial security and debtless spending money that many of our parents did, and we have thus far not been able to accept that fact.
World War II left the planet in ashes and the United States with 50% of the world’s wealth, and a corresponding rise in lifestyle quality, at least for those not Jim Crowed into poverty. Slowly but very surely, that share of global assets has diminished, to the point that we now only comprise between a third and a fourth of the world’s economy. We of the GenX set have only known bubbles, not true prosperity. My twenties corresponded with the tech bubble, and indeed it burst all over my face. Now, in my thirties, the mortgage bubble has popped. It’s likely that many more letdowns are in store, and the distribution of the workforce across continents offers little hope for the lower middle class’ future beyond somehow maintaining the low end of the present status quo. My uncle-in-law spotted the tech bust coming in 1999, I myself spotted the impending real estate bust 5 years ago while processing insane mortgage applications, and in various capacities since I have seen portents of future calamity which I won’t go into here.
At this point, the logic is plainer than plain: Get off the goddamned grid. Establish a life as separate from the prevailing societal winds as possible, and weather the storm. Learn to live with less, preferably in a sustainable manner, and largely free of debt obligations.
How. Incredibly. Boring.
And that’s really what it boils down to, I suppose. There’s probably a reason for the stereotype of the artist who spends what he hasn’t got, revels in isolated moments of prosperity, and basically does himself in due to lack of forethought. But of course it’s not lack of forethought. I’ve thought about it. The information is there. I’m just not using it.
The left-brain/right-brain divide is a pesky force in human history. It can be perfectly evident what the logical course of action is, and yet the lives of perfectly intelligent people are often lived as if logic does not exist. The frustrating thing is that sometimes the less attention you pay to logic, the better result you get. And you never know whether the problem you’re currently pondering is one of those best solved by the gut, or one of the myriad sharp stones just waiting to be stumbled over by ignoring the obvious shadow they cast in your path.
Biographies are filled with tales of those who threw caution to the wind and won. That’s because no one’s interested in those whose caution got caught on the tree branches and ripped to shreds.
I have twin forces working on me at the moment. One is the impending completion of a creative project which will require a bit of money and effort to get to market. Hope and optimism direct me to give it everything I’ve got, in the belief that it will advance my artistic career, which is, mostly, what I live for.
The other force grows by the day, and would probably stop if I weren’t a news and blog junkie. It is the growing certainty that this country, and possibly the world, is headed for a recession/depression/big ball o’ shit in the very near future. Were I single and childless, I would start thinking about joint housing options with friends, and bohemian ways to duck the blade should it slice my way.
What I have, however, is a dependent and a spouse, and the requirements for each have to factor into my thinking. Yes, I know children are resilient, but if I’m gonna have a kid, I have a certain standard of living I want to keep up, both for his sanity and mine. My wife’s standards are a bit higher still, though hardly oppressive. Just a hair enough above mine, and most of them kid-focused, which is as it should be.
All of this means that as much as I’d like to give myself over to artistic dreamland, I really do feel I have to make plans for the possibility of economic disaster. I have grandparents who made it through the Great Depression, but not without harrowing tales of deprivation and struggle. Yes, the world is a different place since then, but in many ways it’s far more dangerous. The U.S. population has more than doubled since 1930, and many people, including myself, have skills that are only of use in a robust, hi-tech economy. Yes, I could bust rocks and lay concrete if I needed to, but there are others far more suited to the task should the need arise.
Upon reading the previous paragraph, of course, I spot the sort of hyperventilating apocalypticism that has traditionally pushed my derision button. And yet the evidence mounts that we are in for very bad things indeed, things we have been blithely ignoring in an economy whose sole impetus is growth.
And every time I get that feeling, I start with the master plans. Moving to the less expensive areas of the EU, trying alternative housing methods in remote parts of the U.S., finding a magic bullet to take us off the grid somehow.
But I am suburban as hell. I enjoy access to art-house theaters, good music venues, nice bookstores, Starbucks, and people who don’t talk about hogs and hay all day long. The sort of country town I grew up in got very stifling after a while, and there’s no reason to think that it wouldn’t again. Again, is a life that’s safe, secure and dull as hell any sort of life at all?
We read history as cause and effect. This led to that, which led to that, and so on. We sometimes blink and wonder how the people who lived through historic times couldn’t have seen them coming. We giggle at people who were totally convinced of an imminent catastrophe that did not in fact materialize.
We know nothing. No more than anyone in history ever has. We make guesses. Those who guess correctly get written up in one type of book, those who do not are thrown into different anthologies. Events do not take place on straight lines, they pop up snarled in webs, with threads woven by millions of individual lives. The entire design of the past is only visible from some distance away, and from that distance we cannot always see the smaller contributions to the greater whole. Like Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorians, we see beginnings, middles, and ends, but seldom the snapshot of a life in mid-decision.
And yet here we are, all of us in mid-decision, a probability wave that resolves every few moments, laying down futures and pasts that will, in the end, seem inevitable. I’m ill-equipped to crank up the free will debate train. I believe I know myself well enough to predict that my upcoming decisions will be far more based on the cerebral end of the hierarchy of needs than the visceral. Nature or nurture, it’s how I’m wired, and always has been.
Logically, then, I should just toss the anguish and accept that if the worst descends upon us, I will be a victim and deal with it as it comes. If we are spared, I will have lost no sleep or time hunting phantoms.
There it stands. It can do no other.
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