Going for broke

How are your finances doing? Great? OK, then you need not read any further. Unless you happen to be worried about the future...

Do you have problems balancing the books? Failing investments? Can’t figure out how to pay for that sofa/midlife crisis sportscar/house or how to support yourself in your old age? You may as well stop reading as well, because there won’t be any solutions offered here.  Unless you think that someone else doing badly will make you feel better…

The news this week provided a reminder that things don’t always work out as you might wish.  Optimism can turn into despair surprisingly quickly.

Go back to the 1950s - a time of excitement about the future (and perhaps just a little bit of worry that the world might come to a rapid end in a nuclear apocalypse, but let’s forget about that for now). This was an era of blossoming industry and the growth of the middle class as a force in society. A time of optimism.

In Detroit – the Motor City – cars were made to represent to spirit of the time. Fabulous cars! Exciting cars! Production lines churned out cars to provide the wheels for a nation.

Move into the 1960s. The birth of pop music and a relaxed way of life. The future was looking great. Fabulous science fiction was written, telling us how glorious everything would soon be. We would have robot helpers. Man would colonize the Galaxy. Towards the end of the decade Neil Armstrong took his famous small step. Man had landed on the moon and would never look back.

In Detroit, cars were made. Big cars. Cool cars.

Skip forwards a couple of decades.

Detroit is a derelict city. Just declared bankrupt. The mere idea seemed ridiculous not long ago, but apparently it can happen. The city of the future turned into the first real post-apocalyptic landscape in just a couple of decades. Factories are left derelict. Houses are left standing just as families left them, with cutlery in the drawers and books still on the shelves. An entire city walked out and didn’t come back.

Cars are made elsewhere…

We have not been back to the moon for many decades. The other planets seem incredibly distant, and let’s not think about the Galaxy. Science fiction has become much darker (please don’t mention vampires!). The vision of the future seems much less optimistic.

What happens next?

Will Detroit rise like a phoenix from the ashes?

That would be nice, but… the ghost towns left from the gold rush suggest it may not work out that way.

Who knows what will happen? If we allow greed to remain the main driver of society (let’s just look at how the banks are behaving, shall we?) then there does not seem to be much hope. 

We need to inject a bit of sanity in society, a bit of restraint.

We need to allow ourselves to dream the dreams of the future from the past (get it?).

I for one really want my robot helper, and I want it soon.