2009, A Saving Odyssey

In Back to Walton's Mountain, novelist Douglas Coupland avers that an across the board reduction in consumer spending, foisted unwillingly on us all like some medicine we knew we needed but hate the taste of, is here to stay. And that means we're suddenly jettisoned off the edge of familiar territory, off a cliff, sailing out into the future without a parachute. Call it "2009, a Saving Odyssey." Key the music.

Right now, it seems almost impossible to imagine ever spending more on things except, maybe, gasoline. And yet the prospect of less consumption fills us with dread. It’s not the having less part that is frightening — people are generally happy as long as everybody’s in the same boat. What’s frightening is the fear that our system can’t handle less, and it’s not as if there’s some other system out there shouting: “Try me! Try me!”

We’ve finally spiked over the edge of the chart — we’re at the place we couldn’t see in social studies classes, when late 20th-century trends like population and raw material consumption and pension indexes were extrapolated along the x- and y- axes into infinity. In my mind we were never really in the future until we hit that edge — and now we have — and because of this, everything we sense in 2009 is going to be new, but that’s what the future was always supposed to be about.