It's hard to stay positive, but some people are still doing the right thing at the right time, writes Sheila O'Flanagan
I‘VE SPENT the last couple of weeks cocooned in an ever deepening sense of pessimism. Every time I turn on the TV or open the paper, I flinch at the barrage of negative information that assaults me. Hopeless bankers, hapless government, grim future . . . and all of it delivered by the slightly patronising voices of reporters who know that their time has come.
The job descriptions of Jeff Randal, Robert Preston and George Lee might be to report the business news, but listening to them these days you’d think that they were actually making it themselves. The other day, as I watched Robert Preston unleash yet another doomsday prognosis, I was gripped with an urge to throw a shoe at him, Iraqi style.
I’m always intrigued at how much deeper the impact of bad news is than good news. In the days when I traded in the world’s bonds and currency markets, I never got the equivalent sense of elation when things went right as I did despair when one of my trades went horribly wrong. Making a profit was great, of course, but making a loss was terrible.
And now it seems that the post-boom losses are a million times worse than the dizzy highs of the champagne lifestyle to which we were apparently addicted.
What’s annoying me most of all, though, is that I clearly wasn’t addicted to it enough. Better to have thrown caution to the winds and spent my hard-earned cash on over-priced designer clothes, bling jewellery and exotic beauty treatments than putting some away for a rainy day. Because the rainy day has clearly come and someone’s nicked my umbrella.
So I listen to Robert and George and Jeffrey as I contemplate the approaching apocalypse and I wonder if we’re spinning out of control and into the kind of Hollywood movie where civilisation as we know it has broken down and we’re all having to live on our wits (though our wits seem to have been the biggest thing we mislaid during the good times).
And then I go out and I talk to my friends who are in many and varied jobs and who are concerned about their futures too. Yet, despite being told that we are all doomed, they are surprisingly optimistic.
After all, as one pointed out, her household expenses have dropped since this time last year. Another, who bought a house a couple of years ago, has shrugged off the declining value of her asset and looked instead at the fact that her mortgage repayments have decreased substantially. And a third, who’s renting a city-centre apartment and who’s been thinking about buying a house, is ecstatic at the bursting of that particular bubble, saying that he was fed up with people telling him that renting a property was dead money and with feeling that he would have to mortgage his very soul to buy a house in a place where he didn’t even want to live.
And before you think that they’re a bunch of Pollyannas who will be rudely awakened when they lose their jobs, they are acutely aware that this could happen.
Everyone knows that the scale of the financial crisis which has hit us is beyond compare. We know that the world has tilted on its axis but unrelenting waves of pessimism and warnings of worse to come will not make things better.
The fallout from a bubble that eventually couldn’t help but burst has been worse than we could ever have imagined. If we’ve learned anything from it, it is that – despite other expert predictions in the past – there’s no such thing as a soft landing. But it is sometimes possible to walk away from a hard one. Hurt maybe. Shaken certainly. Yet doing the right thing at the right time under pressure can yield the necessary result.
It needs strength of character and purpose and I agree that they’ve been sadly lacking in many business leaders and politicians to date. But not everywhere.
I spent almost as much time last week watching the extraordinary outcome of US Airways Flight 1549 as I did watching George Lee telling me I was doomed. Like millions of others, I was heartened to realise that life isn’t always about people doing the wrong thing and taking advantage of others. I cheered not just the pilot of the plane but the owners and captains of the boats and tugs that came racing to its rescue in an immediate public private partnership.
This week’s inauguration of Barack Obama has yet another good news story pushing its way to the front pages. I’m not sure how best to cope with such sudden bursts of positivity!
www.sheilaoflanagan.net
