My friend Betsy says it's official: It is now hip to be broke, and I think she is right.
It is cool to talk about what a bath your 401(k) has taken and how your job is hanging by a thread. The topics that our parents would never discuss - how much money we make and how much we spend - are now standard cocktail party chatter.
I never thought there would be a subject that would push our children out of the center of all conversation, but I was wrong. This recession - they are calling it the Great Recession now - has done it. We used to complain that we couldn't get our kids on the phone. Now we complain that we can't get our broker on the phone.
We aren't eating out, and we aren't buying clothes. We are canceling neighborhood pool memberships and summer vacation plans. We can't afford to replace our computers or our cars.
And we don't mind who knows. It's all we can talk about.
Conspicuous consumption is now conspicuous by its absence. If you are buying anything right now, you are keeping that news to yourself. What would the neighbors think?
It is cool to conserve. Buy stock in Tupperware, because everyone is bringing leftovers to work for lunch. Open a repair shop, because nobody is buying new. Shop your closet, and when someone compliments your outfit, you can say "This old thing?" and mean it.
After 9/11, President Bush urged the country to spend, spend, spend so the terrorists wouldn't have the satisfaction of thinking they had blown up the American economy along with the buildings that symbolized the American economy.
We put our hands over our hearts - with our credit cards in our palms - and headed to the mall.
Not this time. We consumers are supposed to drive the economic recovery, but we haven't got the guts to press the accelerator.
If you haven't lost your job, your co-worker or your neighbor or your brother-in-law has. And if your job is safe, your earnings aren't. Furloughs, we are told, are what you do for the greater good. Salary rollbacks are what you do for the friend in the cubicle next to you. Even if you are doing OK, somebody else isn't, and it is part of the new economic moral imperative for you to share the suffering.
If you are spending in this kind of atmosphere, you are rich. If you are rich and you are not spending, you are just trying to fit in with everybody else. If you are broke and spending, you are doing your bit to jump-start the economy. If you are broke and you aren't spending, you are feeling prudent and virtuous and like you don't need material goods to make you happy.
