One aspect of the Western economic system has been the leveraging of manufactured scarcity. Markets have always played at scarcity to drive up demand and price. But that’s a very different thing from real scarcity.
Although those in society’s lower socioeconomic strata have always dealt with real scarcity, it has not been experienced by the majority of Americans in a generation.
But we are all about to find out what real scarcity is. What it means. What it feels like.
And this was also manufactured… but perhaps not deliberately.
Nonetheless, it will hit us hard. It will hurt. We will suffer great loss. And to survive, we will have to change our relationship with “things”.
We will be forced to make the shift from valuing quantity to valuing quality. Learning to “make do” with less will be a matter of survival. Luxury will be: enough food to get through the day, a roof over your head at night, some basic healthcare and basic security. This will be the measure of wealth for most of us.
But it’s possible that the loss of excess can bring us closer to the fundamental beingness of life. Closer to what it means to be human. When we are no longer able to find a semblance of meaning in “things”, we will look elsewhere. We will look to one another.
And I suspect that’s where we will find what we’ve always been looking for.
Join us in making the world a better place. You’ll be glad you did.
Cheers, friends.