The Great Return and being poor(er)

Are you feeling the panic? The cost of living crisis is no joke, especially for those who don’t have assets to provide a soft fall. Unfortunately inflation creates a chain of events that makes life worse and worse for those at the bottom.

People are faced with situations over which they have variable levels of control. It is our control over our quality of life that is currently being tested in many cases and causing so much anxiety. On top of that, we live in a very unequal society, so whilst some people are financially suffering at material levels because of the cost of living crisis, other people are not. Sure, inflation hits us all but, given the fact that many people have become rich due to the low interest environment of the past decade, combined with the asset-bubble creating impact of Quantitative Easing, the rich are not exactly going to be destitute. In terms of economics, we can argue that QE was inevitable going to lead to this point without being balanced by other elements of monetary policy, but that is for another newsletter. We are where we are.

Those without assets are facing disproportionate rising costs – higher rent, fuel and food costs all hit the less well-off and middle-income people more. For example, many people in the UK now rent out properties; to maintain their own living standards they have raised the rent and it is renters who are now in worse trouble.This means stress: the stress of not being able to forget about money and gradually having to adjust elements of one’s lifestyle. The frightening thing is that we don’t know where this is going to end up. What can we do personally and organisationally?

Being poor(er) is a taboo. All sorts of identity features that were hushed in the past are now causes for pride but not being in a difficult economic situation. Just looking at LinkedIn, it is clear that people are jostling for prestige and vying to be in the ‘made it’ category. This is fine until we start feeling down if we are not in, or drop out of this bracket.

There is still a huge amount of blame and judgement placed on not being ‘respectable’ and having a good job – well actually it can be less about the job and more about money. We live in interesting times where the onus is on having money but also feeling entitled to the freedom to not do anything we don’t like. In hard times, these two wants clash.

At a personal level, people may have to adjust to what they feel entitled to. This is going to be a shock because many people have taken personal decisions to be more in control of their lives (for example joining the ‘Great Resignation’ from work) and adopting lifestyles more conducive to wellbeing. When things get tough we have to decide whether we can maintain the lifestyle we want or accept a degree of compromise with the level of control we have. Pragmatism and resilience is needed. Once again, it is those with no choice who will be forced to return to full time to office jobs they don’t like, rather than working remotely, over time this will extend to more and more people.

More fundamentally, we need as a society to start to become less ashamed of not ‘making it’ especially since making it is a roll of the dice most of the time. Much valiant effort has been put into combating unfairness in recruitment but it remains a huge issue. More harmful though is the belief (still held) that we are failures if we don’t live up to often our own expectations.  When times are tough, it is easy for morale to go backwards, which makes it less likely that people will move forward. There needs to be a society-wide recognition of the nonsense way we value people and devalue people at the moment and this should start right now.