A New Kind of More

Will the present economic slowdown will be a little different from those of past decades?
Part of what defines an economic recession is sharp reduction in the amount of ‘stuff’ people can buy. I’d never minimize the anguish that people will feel over lost jobs and home foreclosures, especially for people who will be hit hardest this time.
And we haven’t all felt some reduced relevance in the possessions washed up on some shoreline down which we hardly remember walking. But some of us have felt this. We might be barely aware of it, or deny it for lack of a new direction that can rise to replace it.
I’m not talking about anti-materialism; I’m talking about anti-irrelevance.
When it comes to forced reductions in purchases of discretionary items, clearly now upon us, one wonders: is our attention today so absorbed by digital media in the broadest sense, accessible now even from ubiquitous hand-held devices, that the richness of our interconnectedness and access to information/entertainment distracts us from a lack of things that no longer hold our attention anyway?
Might a lesson we take from this recession be that we can and should demand a new kind of more, rather than that we can make do with less?

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