Cheer up, it's only the end of civilisation!

There's an awful lot of doom and gloom about at the moment isn't there?
House prices are dropping, a credit squeeze looms, there's a global melt-down (climatically and financially), obesity is rife, wine is going to kill us all and a new series of Big Brother is starting soon.

It couldn't get worse could it?

Well of course it could!

Here we sit in front of our computers, connected to the "world-wide-web", all the information in the world at our fingertips. We are warm and dry and probably well fed (too well in some cases). We can enjoy music and pictures from anywhere, we can talk to people all over the world if we need to and we have transport links to anywhere we want to go. So why the glum outlook?

It's the Eyore syndrome. All those lottery-winners who go off the rails and end up in a drug-fuelled spiral of despondency are just the extreme example of this effect. Every bright sunny spell has a bloody-great storm-cloud waiting just around the corner.

We, as western society, have had it so good for so long we now feel that something must be wrong. And as long as we feel that way, something will be wrong pretty soon. It's self fulfilling.

I'm old enough to have fond memories of the seventies, but if I look back at old film of the time it looks terrible... endless industrial disputes, rubbish in the streets, power cuts, the three-day week, awful British cars that wouldn't start, flared trousers and cravats. How did we survive?

Pretty damn well actually. The music was fun and uplifting, we were young and optimistic, we had enough of the essentials and the weather was good.. at least some of the time.

If we do plunge into some kind of mini-depression I hope it'll eventually rekindle some of that spirit of pulling together to "get through it" whilst a load of financial spectulators jump off buildings.

homo-sapiens need a challenge, otherwise they get bored and spend all day surfing the internet (oops!) and playing video-games whilst eating burgers. The easy life is not good for us, it makes us fat and being fat makes us miserable, and being miserable makes us watch more TV, which advertises junk-food. Bring on your Global Warming and your credit-sqeeze, we'll be all the happier for it.

© Winamop. March 2008

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