Affluenza: Is the Tide Turning?

Professor J,

Thanks for manning the ship last week! The bathroom graffiti was disturbing and illustrates perfectly the need for all the documentation that was done upon liberation of the camps, interviews, books, photographs, etc. Well done, you, making sure something was done about it.

The articles you linked to were interesting. While I was catching up on your posts I had a couple of questions:

Can you give a couple of examples of past "immediate catastrophic propellants to great action and change" I'm assuming you mean wars, revolutions, famines and the like but I'd like to know exactly what you had in mind. 

While I'm excited about a cultural shift toward simplicity among young people, does that in some ways leave the "store" untended allowing the elites to grab more while we are all meditating and simplifying? 

Since I posted about this generation's willingness to share and live lives less centered around accumulating things I've seen even more examples of ways people are working around the old systems.

Yerdle.  A site that allows you to give things away and accumulate points for them. You then use the points to "purchase" something you need. 

Freecycle. A way to let your community know when you are giving something away allowing someone who needs it to come and pick it up. 

Zipcar. A car sharing service. 

Nextdoor. A way to share things like lawn equipment, tools, or even child care in a neighborhood.

Bike sharing systems that go by various names in different cities. 

Thrift stores are multiplying like crazy. 

Add to the list farmer's markets, community gardens, and a rise in bartering among friends and it makes me hopeful that new systems might be loosely in place soon enough to avert disaster for many people if the worst happens. Everything old is new again it seems. Ideas that worked in the past are becoming fashionable. Grandparents and great grandparents look wiser all the time. Lots of young couples are looking to live in walkable neighborhoods and my daughter and son in law are keen to become a "one car family." Keeping up with the Joneses is less about something shiny and new for this generation and more about what a sustainable lifestyle looks like. 

One lesson that appears to have taken hold in the aftermath of the Great Recession is that we not only didn't need all that debt, we don't really want the stuff that goes with it.