Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

There has been so much going on in the world economy that it hard to keep track of it.  Stuff that happened two weeks ago seems like it was months ago.  A lot of people are showing signs of being quite lost.  Optimism is in short supply.

A friend was talking to me about how we would all be “hunkering down” for the winter in floppy sweaters (’cuz we can’t afford to heat the house), eating homemade soup and bread together and playing games (’cuz none of us can afford to go out and do anything).

She was saying this like it was a bad thing.

This country is going to go through some dramatic changes.  They may not seem desirable at first but, quite frankly, I think we have lost our collective soul.

We get back to basic values, get back to saving, move away from the idea that we should get more than we need, return to the things that made the United States the most powerful nation in the history of the world.

Yeah … I mean that.

I wrote about about the possibility of our current reality in my book (The Wealth Manifesto), the writing of which was more or less done just about a year ago.  I mentioned that we were going to be on our own as far as employment, retirement, and our financial future.  This is a given; what has happened in the last couple of months have only more than guaranteed this.  We are so wrapped up in the credit mess, we have not even got to the real impending disaster of Social Security and Medicare.  One of the best things we can do is not forget to leverage what we do best: innovate.   There is an entrepreneurial imperative at hand that should be something everyone takes to heart, not just the software junkies of Silicon Valley.  We can even make lemonade out of the supertanker full of lemons that we are being handed:  this bailout mess has the possibility of opening up all kinds of new opportunities for products and services that didn’t exist before.  There is always great opportunity in change.

What really needs to change … is us.