10 Membranes

» An Upside to the Recession

“Our elders, who bought prosperity and nice pensions at our expense and pulled the ripcords on their “Freedom 55” parachutes without leaving any behind in the passenger cabin, are getting it in the neck”. There is a grain of truth in this.

The major beneficiaries of the late boom were, other than the usual gang of bankers, traders, hedge fund managers, private equity partners, brokers, analysts etc etc, boomers. The generation that had it all: free education, good jobs for life, final salary pensions, paid off mortgages on the town house and a place in the country to boot.

A major loser was people like myself- fresh out of university, struggling to survive in the cash hole of London, giddyly staring up at the ever more vertiginous property prices, wondering gloomlily if we should all just decamp to cheap Berlin and live in a commune eating beans and talking politics.

So despite the recession, the unemployment and layoffs, the cripplingly panic that actually the whole world might be going into some insane meltdown from which civilized society will never recover, despite this a part of me still says: ha bloody ha. Let’s just hope it doesn’t get too much worse.

Unfortunately my generation is also pinpointed: we take benefits like jobs and new trainers utterly for granted and will at some level be incapable of dealing with collapse of hyper-consumerism as we know it. That is possibly true for some. Personally I quite like the idea of living in a commune, eating beans and talking politics.