[Orignally posted at The Marfa Project etc.]
This cartoon represents the great #firstworldproblem of our age. We’re all just trying to do too much, and it’s wearing us out.
In a this *brave* new world of stimulus oversupply, we’re starting to see potential antidotes popping up everywhere, that besides providing gainful employment to our friends the hipsters, is becoming an increasingly important coping mechanism and necessary part of the overall economy.
I call it “The Antidote Economy”. Bed & breakfast weekends in Vermont, Zen meditation retreats in New Mexico, farmer’s markets, specialist coffee and tea shops, Shaker furniture, yoga classed, art galleries in Laguna Beach, artisanal pickles, hand made scented candles, and of course, Brooklyn. It’s an increasingly huge cultural phenomenon, simply because we need more and more antidotes to balance out our increasingly expensive yet frazzled quality of life.
Is embracing The Antidote Economy full-time a cure for all our ills? No, sadly, it’s just for some of us. To make a living in The Antidote Economy, you also need a fairly large, affluent chunk of the population to still remain on the outside looking in. You need enough stressed out, overprogrammed yuppy-scumbag types in boring, 80-hour-week office jobs that they hate, to ensure that there’s enough disposable income swishing around to fund your alternative, post-capitalist lifestyle experiment.
i.e. Brooklyn is only possible because Manhattan is never very far away. “Authentic” living needs lots of “fake” people in order to pay for it.
