Means
One of the interesting results of the crash of the economy and the real estate market is what they brought into reach. In cities like Downtown Los Angeles, Austin, Phoenix, or Detroit, living accommodations that would been considered only by the wealthy just a few years earlier are not only available but desperate for tenants.
So suddenly you find yourself living in a 1,000 sq foot loft with stainless steel appliances and granite countertops and a view. It doesn’t take long for you to start thinking these floor-to-ceiling windows are a normal, natural part of my existence because that’s what our narrative tendency does – it stretches to arc around the points available.
This mirrors a larger trend in media. As publishing costs have plummeted, what were previously unattainable perks of an industry seem to peak out at just above eye level. Take a precocious amateur musician and put him in a room with the biggest band in the world and conceivably they’d have a lot to commiserate about: Myspace plays, YouTube views, iTunes downloads. They can throw around identical phrases with huge disparities in meaning – “spending time in the studio,’ an “album release party,” even going “on tour.” What was once a world that had to be broken into, a privileged position that needed to be earned, the amateur inhabits the second he decides to call himself a musician.
This creates interesting incentives, ones that have deeper personal consequences than their industry economics. As people, we have access to social spheres that have shed long-held barriers of entry. Yet the status and narrative associations still retain the prestige that goes along with the struggle and sacrifice they required.
There was a short period in my life where I was receiving regular amounts of fan emails for my writing. It ranged from devoted to unhinged. Yet, at 20, I’d never really written anything at all. I certainly wasn’t a “writer” but there, I’d experienced something that eludes people who dedicate years of their lives to the profession.
It’s tempting notion to buy into, that it’s actually real. Because if you do, you don’t have to do anything else. You don’t have to get any better. The position becomes one where it’s irrational to set out and pay dues – to try and earn the illusion. Don’t buy the cow, the saying goes, if you can get the milk for free.
The precipitous drop in prices of plasma tvs, for instance, from lavish to commonplace has far outpaced their fall in status. Objects in this period become empty symbols – an available vessel for you to suspend your disbelief. Having doorman in your building. Being a writer or a musician or a comedian or a social media expert. Same deal.
As a people already predisposed towards narcissism, we’re certainly not compelled to quibble over differences that work out massively in the favor of our ego. But purchasing power isn’t really power at all. Or at least, it isn’t power that we have. The authority oscillates entirely outside of our control. This should make us humble, not enabled.
I’ve tried as much as I can to opt out. Recently, it’s become more clear and easier. I sold my car and bought a shitty old one I didn’t need to transfer money into my checking account to clear. I moved out of my apartment into a shotgun unit in the back of someone else’s house. I feel happier – less weighed down and more honest.
In my thinking, you can use a bad economy in two ways. Arbitrage: picking up the underpriced empty objects and coast on the surplus. Or, like a tide: take note of what was left exposed when the water went out and cut all that shit from your portfolio.
Hey man. How’s it going? I just picked up a copy of Vagabonding, and am 1/4 way through it. Your post really resonates with that book.
I am moving to Singapore Thursday and have been going through the process of cutting the useless unneeded shit from my life as well. It is amazing how fast chudder piles up.
I don’t think it is wrong to take advantage of a downturn to experience privileges that are normally inaccessible, as long as you realize those privileges are out of your control and will be lost when the next economic cycle prices them out of reach.
The nice apartment overlooking the private tennis club, membership to private tennis club, heck, a friend and I are even buying a sailboat. I don’t expect my retirement will have so many toys, and I hope I won’t feel entitled to them for essentially showing up at the right places for 40 years.
I don’t feel any sympathy for the retirees complaining about losing their savings in this recession. Political changes, natural disasters, disease, or any number of what are really normal events occurring throughout a lifetime could have all had the same effect, and would have been even more out of their control.
Feeling entitled to expensive toys (that you can’t even fully enjoy anymore) because you believe you’ve worked hard at meaningful things for a set period of time is not that different from other kinds of entitlement. It’s also not that different from thinking you will go to heaven because you haven’t committed that many of what you believe are sins.
Solid post, Ryan.
Years ago I determined that unless I could assign a tangible value to an item, and pay cash, I didn’t need it.
I’m not saying that I don’t deviate from that in small ways occasionally, but I’m not shopping for lease deals on a new bimmer either. Status and ego have been replaced with function and purpose; debt is zero.
This is a conversation killer in L.A. as it’s hard to talk about less when everyone seemingly has ‘more’ on the mind. I guess that’s not such a bad thing, really..
I think you hit this dead on.
One thing I’ve been noticing a lot of recently is that people who are hung up on these accessible things, whether it be tangible status symbols like TVs and apartments or less tangible symbols such as a blog or # of subscribers to a blog, don’t realize that others don’t care. Maybe it’s that I work in the music industry and am surrounded by people with more superficial concerns, but it seems that most people can see through the bullshit. The only people that can’t are those that also only care about these superficial things.
You’ve written about this before, and I tend to agree. Suddenly every jobless college grad who knows how to use facebook is an entrepreneur. Help your dad’s friend who owns a restaurant use twitter and suddenly you have a “business”. It’s insulting to real entrepreneurs who take real risk and spend their time creating something that adds value and makes money beyond themselves.
But than I can’t help look at the other side.Any intelligent, aware, educated young man realizes 90% of his peers will end up working 50-60 hrs a week doing meaningless work as some meaningless middle man, and worst of all making real money for somebody else.
Is there real harm in doing it on your own on your own time instead? I get frustrated myself when I see peers suddenly thinking they are more important than they actually are, blogging about the tribulations of being a “business owner”, but those people would be delusional no matter who they worked for. They are the same people who work for a corporation and get pulled into water cooler gossip, and take their jobs too seriously.
Is a self-aware young man really better off starting a career? Why shouldn’t he take advantage of new resources to make some bucks for himself? I honestly can’t decide on this issue.
This post is so incredibly dead on, I cannot agree more… it’s almost like you’re reading my mind though I doubt I could explain it as you just did.
Though I’ve been writing my entire life and have published various things, I still don’t consider myself to be a “writer” and when anyone calls me that I get uneasy which is why I always do 10 other things almost as if to avoid that label. Recently on facebook a friend of mine posted a picture of me that he took, and one of his friends (who I don’t know) commented “she looks like an artist” to which I replied “i am not an artist” and then my friend replied “she is a writer denying that it involves any artistry.”
Ugh..
Most of the people I know who are quick to call themselves writers are usually not, or they just want me to read their screenplay or batch of cliche ridden poems to get an ego stroke. A friend’s husband just mailed me a screenplay and I’m a third into it and want to cry b/c it makes no sense and I’m so tired and I wonder why I always friggin agree to read everyone’s stuff. In this case he sent it via email and I get so sick of staring at a screen that I told him to snail mail it (secretly hoping he wouldn’t) and alas it appeared.
Sorry for the aside- oh yes, there is a point to this. The friend’s husband will say he is a writer within the first few minutes of meeting him.
As for the economy and stripping down, I am not sure how much barer I can get, and I was pretty much opted-out even during the big boom. Now it’s ‘hip’ to be frugal and a garage sale shopper which is kind of funny. When I was making six figures in sales and all my coworkers were buying condos and new cars I still lived exactly as I do now which enabled me to save money and ride out this downturn or at least just enjoy my ‘sabbatical’ semi sponsored by unemployment.
As for publishing and music being stripped down, there was an incredible article in the New York Times called Texts without Context, and it’s true, it’s all about sound bites and mashing ideas up but not really producing anything of much value because we are too busy skimming tweets.
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/books/21mash.html
Art will always survive and people who love it will do it anyway. They will be compelled to do it and people who are compelled to make profits off of artists will find a way to do that too. Gillian Welch says it best…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFle2YoQwWg
You know what’s awesome? Starting a Reading List with the sole intention of guilting people to buy books off Amazon so you get a cut of the sales. And then posting about how you don’t actually care about money, when you really only downsized because you’re now poor.
THAT’S AWESOME!!!
What are you talking about?
“I sold my car and bought a shitty old one I didn’t need to transfer money into my checking account to clear.”
I don’t know if I understand the meaning of this sentence, but it sounds like you’re economizing now out of necessity. In the rest of your post, aren’t you counseling that we economize DESPITE all of the newly accessible Vessels o’ Status (e.g. plasma tv, car, apartment)? It all still seems like good advice to me, but this makes it sound like post hoc rationalization for your own situation.
Also, you’re blending the psychology and the economics of the situation. Being on the profitable side of an arbitrage does not automatically mean you’re on a hedonistic shopping spree. If you needed/wanted a house…and you are leveraging your advantage in the current market to get one…you could, conceivably, take that opportunity without overstating your own role in making the purchase. That’s not narcissism, that’s intelligence.
You can be humble and enabled at the same time.
@ Kojisan: “a friend of mine posted a picture of me that he took, and one of his friends (who I don’t know) commented “she looks like an artist” to which I replied “i am not an artist” and then my friend replied “she is a writer denying that it involves any artistry.
Ugh..”
So after writing all your life and having “published several things”, the fools surrounding you insist on calling you a writer. Frustrating, I’m sure…
Kind of seems like you’re flattered by it, what with your entire post styling yourself as the exact thing you claim to reject. If it helps, I never would have accused you of being a writer if you hadn’t mentioned how often you get harassed about it.
Does everyone here have a hard-on for their own humility? What happened to taking an opportunity or a compliment with grace? You couldn’t let a total stranger walk away with the impression that someone he thought “looks like an artist” (meaningless) actually was one? You can’t make a purchase in this economic climate that was previously out of reach without being pathological?
And nobody sees the irony in bragging about how little they have to brag about?
Why would it sound like that at all? Do you know how checking accounts work? Most people keep small amounts of money in them for day to day expenses and the rest in savings. CARS don’t normally fall into that category.
I’ll leave the rest of your questions unanswered since they all suffer from your same inability to make good inferences or assumptions.
I thought it was a case of bad grammar and took a different meaning from that sentence (I thought you couldn’t afford your last car), which completely changed my reading of your post.
Embarrassing. I apologize.
“In my thinking, you can use a bad economy in two ways. Arbitrage: picking up the underpriced empty objects and coast on the surplus. Or, like a tide: take note of what was left exposed when the water went out and cut all that shit from your portfolio.”
I think that this is too simple. There are lots of good reasons to buy stuff NOW, while the tide is out, but there are ALWAYS good reasons to trim the fat. By invoking narcissism, I think you’re painting people making big purchases now with too broad a brush.
The third way to navigate this economic situation is to buy all the things you *already needed* AND jettison all the shit that dragged others down. i.e. now would be a great time to move your family to a better location AND trade in your luxury SUV.
I’m sorry if this still seems off track, I just didn’t think spartan vs. narcissist fairly described the situation. I think the third player is the conscientious opportunist. There are a lot of winning strategies here aside from Fight Club style asceticism.
Hi, Stephan,
No, I’m not flattered by it.. why? Because I do not consider myself to be a writer. Truth be told I’m more of a hack, and no one is more aware of it than myself, and I feel like if ever wrote something I am truly proud of than I would be worthy of being able to call myself a “writer.”
As for the “published works” two were books, both funded through grants and not necessarily indicative of being anything other than a hack. I also have a story called ’30 days notice’ which is on a site called changethis.com. The story is labeled as “creative nonfiction” and I don’t think it takes any special skill to write about your life. True fiction writers, in my opinion, can be called real writers. http://changethis.com/manifesto/show/53.06.30Days
Journalism stories, poetry, comedic sketches, blogging, plays, newsletters, technical ghostwriting for a manufacturer, annual reports for a foundation, appeal letters, endless resumes and cover letters for other people, well no, none of it adds up to being “a writer.”
Re: ” What happened to taking an opportunity or a compliment with grace? You couldn’t let a total stranger walk away with the impression that someone he thought “looks like an artist” (meaningless) actually was one? You can’t make a purchase in this economic climate that was previously out of reach without being pathological?”
I guess I lack grace and have a hard time with accepting compliments…. and yeah, it was a meaningless enough comment, the fact I felt the need to deconstruct or analyze it just shows how self absorbed I am I guess. The fucked up thing about “social media” is the fact you can even be a fly on a wall to such conversations or comments. It seems like the smart thing to do is opt out from it all so why are there so many people that haven’t?
Regarding making a purchase in this economic without being pathological, I guess the ‘Bag Lady Syndrome’ strikes regardless of whether it’s the boom years or lean times…. Having a father that died when I was 15 and a mom that wasn’t working and a house we couldn’t afford and then struggling through college with three jobs and always having a job will kind of give a personal financial hang-ups, or not be as easy with money as someone that comes from a more privileged background. In many ways I’ve never given myself the permission to be a writer because I don’t want to be completely broker either.
Thanks also for your kind words on your not knowing I’m a writer based on these comments. I believe people are what they do, and I’m not trying to impress anyone with stream of conscious responses to blogs and whatnot. In general I write because it’s like a pacifier and calms me down, and I love the fact time passes so fast when I’m writing.
oh, sorry, just realized i misspelled your name, stephen
The issue you guys are discussing comes up in “The War Of Art,” which I’m sure you’re aware is on Ryan’s list of “Books to base your life around,” and it definitely deserves it’s place there.
“Self-doubt can be an ally. This is because it serves as an indicator of aspiration. It reflects love, love of something we dream of doing, and desire, desire to do it. If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), “Am I really a writer? Am I really an artists?” chances are you are.
The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death”
(I owe Ryan’s reading list for introducing the book to me, and his note-taking method for being able to find the passage quickly. Thanks)
[My apologies if this comes up a 2nd time, I tried to post once already it and it didn’t show up after I refreshed the page.]
The issue you guys are discussing comes up in “The War Of Art,” which I’m sure you’re aware is on Ryan’s list of “Books to base your life around,” and it definitely deserves it’s place there.
“Self-doubt can be an ally. This is because it serves as an indicator of aspiration. It reflects love, love of something we dream of doing, and desire, desire to do it. If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), “Am I really a writer? Am I really an artists?” chances are you are.
The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death”
(I owe Ryan’s reading list for introducing the book to me, and his note-taking method for being able to find the passage quickly. Thanks)
Brian, that’s a really cool quote.
It reminds me of:
“The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt”
-Bertrand Russell
P.S. Where is Ryan’s “books to base your life around” list?
Just re-read this entry and I think there is another perspective to take on what Ryan’s saying. I think the same idea can be applied to our states of mind. I have a tendency when I’m feeling great to think: “Great, I’ve made it, the changes I’ve made are paying off.” Sometimes this is true, most of the time it’s not. All it takes is a little push and my good mood can crumble, some underlying insecurity comes to surface.
So I think what Ryan is said is that when self-confidence comes your way keep level headed about who you are and your insecurities and when insecurities surface examine yourself and remove them. One is an opportunity for humility and the other for improvement.