Our Future will be our Past

What in the world has happened to us?

Several years ago I began looking around at the other cars on the freeway and something struck me...where were all the old cars? I don't mean clunkers spewing black smoke with a window covered in duct tape. I mean the cars that were ten or fifteen years old and ran well. I owned a car like this when I was 20 and I drove the hell out of it.

How was it possible to have a freeway full of new and barely owned vehicles? When I was growing up in the 70's I remember someone getting a new car as a major household event. In fact when someone drove a new car home the entire block ran down to see it!

When I was a kid we had one phone, in the kitchen with a 15 foot cord and for privacy you had to stretch it far enough to close the bathroom door. We had one television set with 8 VHF channels and both cars in the driveway were very used. I watched Saturday morning cartoons with my brothers and sisters and then we found something to do for the rest of the day until dark. That included books, board games, football in the street or walking a few miles to the movie theater for a matinee.

Today houses have three or four televisions, each with hundreds of channels. In their rooms kids now have their own TVs, DVD players, computers and playstations. My friends now fret over when they will finally buy their 11 year old her own cell phone. I'm not kidding. It seems that kids need a cell phone for emergencies. I can't remember having emergencies when I was 11. When I had a problem I had to either go the school office, or to my mom.

Houses today look like mansions with sparkling cars in the driveway. The kind of cars teenagers drive today are equivalent to what I'm driving as a 41 year old father. My friends' vacations beat out anything I had ever heard of as kid. And this happens every year.

How is this possible? Well the short answer is...it's not. Where we have gotten lost is not just in our materialism but in the belief that this lifestyle, and this level of prosperity, is "normal". In fact in the minds of the general public, this is not even normal, it's simply expected. This lifestyle is now some kind of benchmark for what people are expecting the future to be. To make matters worse affordability is no longer defined by whether you have the money to purchase something, now it simply translates to whether someone has enough left to make the monthly minimum payment.

Unfortunately this reality is warped and terribly unsustainable, and deep down anyone over the age of 30 knows it. Society is driving a car whose gas gauge is on empty, facing a hundred miles of desert, and just ignored the last gas station. What no one talks about is that sinking feeling deep inside, the sense that we have pushed things way too far and are going to pay dearly for it.

Sadly instead of turning the car around, the country continues forward. We continue forward with the pedal to the metal for two reasons; 1) we don't know there is a hundred miles of empty road ahead, and 2) we're hoping for a miracle. A magic formula which, while not yet discovered, will ultimately deliver us from our reckoning with little to no suffering.

Everywhere I turn people are all speeding happily along, consoling themselves by regurgitating economic opinions from the market pundits, opinions that they don't really understand but somehow helps them feel that this is just a big bump in the road. That while there may have been some splurging those problems are being ironed out and soon we will be back to running our kids to all of their activities, buying them expensive clothes, and going out to dinner three times a week.

If you surround yourself with people who are doing all the same things, you don't just feel normal, you feel downright knowledgable.

I remember a math teacher in high school once told us that the reason we shouldn't copy off someone else's paper was because the person sitting next to you is probably wrong too. Today everyone is looking at each other for answers and affirmation. But deep down we have gone completely off the tracks and we know it. If you close your eyes you can feel it.

The reckoning is coming. And it will be that our future becomes our past.