I asked in my MBA class last night — so what do we refer to about the current financial mess? One of the students called out: “The Depression.”

I put out two temporary names:

“The New Normal” — The past few years have been an overinflated blur of too much buying with no real value. Jobs were created selling things that people didn’t need to people who really weren’t generating the value to afford them. We really can’t go back there again and shouldn’t. The TARP Stimulus Package is going through old pipes into old sectors to bribe people into creating old types of jobs so people can want more stuff again. This isn’t creating new “innovation” or new value for society…minimal retraining…minimal rethinking…so far. So I might call this The New Normal.

The Great Panic of 2009-2011 — Maybe we will “recover” but to what? Maybe we will just gain confidence in the “system” and that we will have jobs and future wealth on the markets going back up again. But we will be jumpy, just like after a major earthquake. A car rolls past, rocks the floor a bit, and you jump and look for doorways. This is my more optimistic name (made more cynical by the timeframe…maybe to 2010?).

I stand a little firmer by The New Normal. There isn’t a chicken in every pot and some people may be fighting for that chicken. I want to figure how we raise more chickens, not just figure out how we go back to selling them pretty dresses to make them look nicer. (I know, bad metaphor.)

We are still applying bandaids and praying for rain. I’m not sure the rain is coming. So if the rain doesn’t come…how do you plan your life and actions differently? What if we aren’t in a world of “more” but are in a world of “divide” and “share”? How do we create Real “more” that society needs, not just wants?

More on this to come.

Past Tidbits and Explorations

Augmenting My Mind

How much in technology is augmenting me versus being a digital vampire? How much is one tool or another improving my life vs. taking time and control away? I'm now about 21 months into having short-term memory problems. I had some kind of a memory degradation when I...

From Music in LA to Digital and Music in Austin

We've just ended the second cycle of our Future of Music in LA projects at the Center for Music Innovation at UCLA Alpert.  We helped run a half-day symposium with the City of LA Dept. of Cultural Affairs and the UC Digital...

Playing with Facebook Stories Camera Effects

My Facebook friends must be thinking I'm nuts (again).  I've been tinkering with Facebook Stories and its Camera Effects.  In fact, I've been playing so much I'm also looking into the Camera Effects and AR (augmented reality) developer group. First, here's some of the...

Craft, Process, and Thinking of Becoming

Today I'm working on taxes for our two college students' FAFSAs and watching "Abstract: The Art of Design" on Netflix in the background.  Christoph Niemann is both in his story and telling his story about craft and life.  He is a character and an animated...

HUD: Stories on How We Work and Decide

Gigi enjoyed sharing thoughts over YouTube and the US Housing and Urban Development (HUD) OCIO Learning Series.  This session was recorded in January and ran as a webinar on March 17.  You can find it now...