Living On A Thin Line

This is a difficult thing to write about but even more difficult to keep bottled up. Lately I have been lamenting (yes, Lazlo laments) about the personal affect the economic downturn has had on me. Sure, I get the macro and even have my own villain’s list, but that aspect of the mess seems so trivial when it touches your own life and the lives of the people you care about.

Over the past few months I have had to lay off friends and associates to stem the bleeding in my own business and have seen others I care deeply about lose their own jobs. With very little in the way of employment prospects out there right now – made even more troubling by the fact that most companies don’t consider hiring leading up to the holidays – it’s very depressing for those without jobs. Add to the fact that most of the people I know who are looking are in professional fields or fields hit the hardest by the economy, and it is very bleak indeed.

It’s so difficult to watch people I know and care about go through this, and it has been very painful for me to make my own economic-based decisions that I know affect the lives of some very good friends and hard workers. It has offered me no solace that I know what it feels like to be on both sides of this equation; just anger. I can never say I am sorry enough to those whose jobs I took by putting my own financial needs ahead of their own. I will suffer through this more than people will ever know because I know it is due to my own failures to be a better steward of my business that caused it.

Most of us were raised with the understanding that we had to fend for ourselves, create our own opportunities, become educated or trained and, especially, be responsible. I think we’ve all been aware of the downside of failing in these areas. Lately, however, there has been a subtle shift in many people’s thinking and what they expect of themselves. I sense there has been a growing expectation that we’re all working with a safety net and others are ready to catch us if they happen to fall, even if they fall out of their own carelessness. Once someone gets to this way of thinking I guess you expect the safety net will get as large as necessary.

It has become far too easy to walk away from responsibility lately. The ability to walk away from one’s problems with little debris left in the way may be the hallmark of the first decade of this century. I know far too many people, responsible people, who have walked away from their homes and businesses; some who could have either avoided the underlying problems that pushed them to their decision or who made bad choices in the first place. I don’t pretend to know what went on in their minds as they made their choices or how agonizing their decisions were. I am sure it has not been a picnic to lock the door in their empty house for the last time. And far be it for me to chatise them when I have walked away from some of my employees.

I guess where I get selfish in my own thinking is that these decisions, when added together with so many similar decisions by others, begins to bring the rest of us down in this slow death spiral. When one house gets taken back by the bank and sold at a hugely reduced price, it causes all the other houses in the neighborhood to lose value. When you get too many houses being sold by banks that are under no pressure to get top dollar, suddenly the whole area sees a drop in home values. Naturally this has a negative impact on the economy in general, causes governments to bail out banks who made these loans (many unsound loans, mind you) and tightens credit to the point that it is essentially unavailable.

And here’s the part where it gets personal: The safety net is now gone for me and my family. Our retirement account has been devastated by the stock market crash, my business has been nearly shut down due to a collapse of personal and corporate wealth and now the one area where I thought I could always count on as a nest egg, my home, is losing value so quickly that I am panicked.

OK, so woe is me. I get it that there are people worse off and many who didn’t want to walk away from their homes. But the fact that it has been made so easy and in such large numbers is trickling up to those of us who took out a fixed rate loan and have (had) 40 percent equity in our homes. The message almost seems to discourage people from keeping their job and their house; the government will be there to pick up the broken pieces. The same is true for businesses. Why should anyone work at keeping a business afloat when a bailout is around the corner? I guess the part that troubles me and worries me to the core is, what happens when there is nobody left to hold the safety net, and are we almost there?