Hunkering and Hiding
I enjoy people watching and, in recent years, I see ever more faces looking flat, worried, or angry. Maybe it’s just because I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, I dunno. But here’s what I imagine is causal:
People seem ever more stressed. The cost of living, beyond what’s counted in the government’s reported inflation rate, is rising — everything from parking meters to property taxes, to deductions eliminated (e.g., for meals) to bridge tolls to having to buy a 4" tomato plant at $4 instead of a six-pack for $2.99. Traffic gets ever worse. Meanwhile salaries tend to go up at barely the inflation rate if that, with the AI scythe threatening to chop many people’s income to zero. And when money is tight, people spend less and worry about whether they can afford organic foods, let alone a boutique-store blouse, or even whether they should cut their medication in half to make it go further.
People feel they must be more careful about what they say, lest they offend. We proclaim to celebrate inclusion but dare a statement veer from The New Orthodoxy, the celebration often stops, often replaced by the 3 C’s: censure, censor, and cancel.
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Clothes used to be a source of pleasure. Now, everyone seems to wear loose-fitting, androgynous gray and black with no-nonsense shoes and hair. If there were a logo for the times, it would be Doc Martens shoes.
So I’m guessing that ever more people are hunkering down, trying to avoid eviction or foreclosure, facing health problems and insurance and Medicare headaches, but per our culture’s expectations, hiding it. So the sadness festers.
I don’t see significant countervailing forces. Rather, schools, media, and churches seem to fan the malaise’s flames: evil America, evil “Haves” who better redistribute yet more to the Have-Nots, lest they be an “ist.”
I feel impotent to affect the macro. So I enjoy my clients, piano playing, gardening, wife, and doggie, hunkering and hiding.
I read this aloud on YouTube.
Marty Nemko is a career and personal coach, and author of 36 books including A Dose of Reality. You can reach him at mnemko@gmail.com
