The American Decline

Sorry folks, but once again the curmudgeon in me has come out.  I feel I have to rant a little.  It may be a little fragmented, but that's just how my mind works.  Hey, I'm not writing a thesis here.

I wonder if there's ever a time or generation when someone doesn't say, "I'm not going to bring a child into this world.  It's a mess" or something along those lines.  I've heard it several times over the decades.  No matter what is going on in the world at any particular time, it's going to affect someone in a negative way.  We've all heard the "back in my day..." remark that has been uttered by virtually every parent or grandparent in history.  I'm no statistician but I can't help but wonder how many times in our nation's history that we have had wild roller coaster rides of change and how far the peaks and dips have gone.  Change is inevitable--everybody knows that, but is it just me or have the "changes" seem to have gotten closer together?

I first experienced it when I was working at Boeing.  I was just hired on and people were saying, "You're lucky--Boeing runs in 7-year cycles and you're getting in at the bottom of a new one!"  Only 3 years later Boeing had taken a complete turn.  I was laid off just over the 5-year mark.  During my last year or two I worked there I heard the following line uttered more than once: "This is not your father's Boeing."  The people that had spent their entire working lives with Boeing were even shaking their head at how weirdly unpredictable things were.

Our current system of values has impacted things a lot too.  Remember when people would say you had to own your house?  It was part of the American Dream.  All our lives we were taught that our house was a huge hedge against inflation and the major anchor to our retirement.  People would say to own your own home because real estate values never decrease.  Well guess what?  They decrease!

It used to be that people generally didn't live beyond their means.  The only things they bought on credit were the big-ticket items that were pretty much necessities.  Home, car, refrigerator--that kind of thing.  Now our society buys everything on payments.  They buy cars they can't afford and pay payments on them forever. Why do I say forever?  Because their original loan was for 6 years but nobody ever seems to keep a vehicle long enough to pay it off before trading it in on another car and another payment.  When I was in school I was taught to pay attention to the amortized interest on a loan.  In a nutshell, if you had to pay on a car for longer than 36 months you technically couldn't afford it.  It was just not a good financial decision.  Now people buy cars they can't afford, giant TVs they can't afford, spend way too much money on food because they're buying it 'ready to eat', and all sorts of other insane decisions with their money.  How can somebody that is working at McDonald's be driving a brand new Lexus with fancy aftermarket wheels and tires? They make payments that's how.  In their lives they own nothing.  You know what that translates to?  It boils down to people not buying a home.  All the people that make all these bad choices with money (that don't have a 6-figure income) have one thing in common: They live in apartments.

Apartments used to only really be necessary in big cities where everything was built upwards because of space considerations.  Now apartments are everywhere, and everybody lives in them.  It seems like our way of thinking has stepped to the side.  We're more disposable.  We don't keep something until it stops working--we keep something until the next model comes out with different features.  You know, 'more of this, less of that, a faster something, and missing nothing'. 

My perception of our country's way of living is can be described in just one word: superficial.  Nobody seems to have any real roots or conviction any more. No plan, no goal, no desire to exceed with hard work and dedication.  An analogy would be when someone removes all the trees from a hillside and plants a lot of flowers to cover it instead because they look so much prettier.  When a good rain comes along the whole thing will wash away and disappear because there were no solid roots to hold it in place.  Through our country's last couple of years of events and their ripple effects people have lost homes, cars, and anything that they might have owned.  Why?  Because everyone was overextended.  The people that owned all their possessions are the ones that did things right.  They didn't spend more than they could afford to.  They didn't get totally washed away.

Ask someone young what their retirement plan is and you'll probably hear one of two answers:

(1) I'm hoping to win the lottery.
(2) I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

I'm no economic major.  I just know I worked hard and I tried to do what I could to save for retirement.  Every job I've had has begun with me putting 15% of my pretax income going into a 401k plan, and that's not easy to do.  Now I'm much older and I've lived to see my money worth squat.  At least I have some money left.  Lots of people have lost all their savings.

There is an old saying: "History repeats itself."  For the most part I'm sure that's true, but until it actually happens and creates a comparison with a past event you really don't know how long that's going to take do you?  Portions of what we are going through have happened before in history, but not the scope of things as they are now.  I wonder how many times people have uttered, "This USED to be a great country."  I'll bet that's one thing that has repeated itself since the beginning.  I find myself bitter, confused, frustrated, and all sorts of other things.  These are supposed to be the years when our life plans start falling into place.  There is a certain level of predictability that a person hopes for as they are going through life.  Short of some kind of medical crisis you should be able to know how your future is going to play out.  You should at least have covered all the bases that you can cover realistically.  At least that's how it used to be.  A certain level of personal responsibility would help, but apparently schools and parents aren't teaching that important tidbit much any longer.

People in this country have changed a lot in the last 5 decades.  As much as I'd like to say there is a simple fix, there isn't.  It's a collective mentality that everyone growing up has these days.  Bling and living for the moment are all that seems to matter.

The future?  I am less comfortable with it now than I ever was.  The only sure thing is that there is no sure thing.