The Big Question

What are you doing after the recession?

The fat has been trimmed. The foreclosures have foreclosed. The wars have been depleting. The oil has been spilled. The failure is complete.

It is time to rise up. So before you rise, it is a good time to ask: “How do I want it to be this time?”

I remember during the Clinton years when everyone I knew was writing a business plan or thinking about writing a business plan for a new internet start-up, or to come up with something like that or to hook up with someone who was doing just that. It was madness. People got the NASDAQ fever and went wild.

Even I, for a minute, thought, “Am I missing something? Should I invent a website?’

That was before the tech bubble. It burst. And things only got worse from then on.

But people were not thinking too much. Even after, they were holding onto the boom years as best they could, during the two wars after the terrorist attacks, all of it.

But that is all long over. And we collapsed. And now we are tentatively rising up. How are you going to do it this time? Will you get pulled into a bubble? Maybe you should be because it is your time. Maybe you’re an amazing cheese maker and the cheese bubble is about to begin. Get in there.

But maybe you’re not a cheese maker. Maybe you’re a great calculus teacher or an amazing painter or a damn fine office manager. Can you be those things and do them in a way that affirms your role in the new world order, post-recession, offering up your services but in service to some great change?

Or am I just a romantic fool? And is human behavior merely reactive to conditions on the ground and so people do not have time for this malarkey?

I just have this sense—that if you rise up, you could do it in a way that is less reactive and more insistent upon what is better and more forward thinking.