First I would like to say thank you to Ryan, from JealousBrother, for the great article yesterday.  We asked him to write a post about whatever he wanted to and he came through.  The great thing about relationships with people is you don’t have to agree with everything they say to recognize the good in them.  Kim and I don’t always agree with Ryan, but we see the goodness in him and that is very important.

Keeping Up With The Joneses

Material wealth.  Isn’t that part of the American dream or “The Dream” period?  There are millions and millions of people who dream of having wealth – that Gates/Winphrey/Murdoch/Walton kind of wealth.  Chasing those material things may have got us into the economic situation we currently find ourselves in, but we have failed to achieve that goal.

According to Wikipedia, the catchphrase “Keeping up with the Joneses” is the desire to be seen as being as good as one’s neighbors or contemporaries using the comparative benchmarks of social caste or the accumulation of material goods.  To fail to “keep up with the Joneses” is perceived as demonstrating socio-economic or cultural inferiority.  Now, even the Joneses are having a hard time keeping up.

The thought of having the bank account to buy anything I want has crossed my mind a time or two , but recently I’ve had to back away and look at things differently.  Good people are losing their jobs and are scrambling to find a way to make ends meet by no fault of their own.  At this time, keeping up with anyone is the furthest thing from my mind.  One reason is I could be in a much worse situation than I currently find myself in.  The second, and more important, reason is I prefer my family over chasing the almighty dollar.  I recently realized I’m happy where I’m at and would be fortunate to maintain my current way of living.  Besides maintaining, my only desire is to have a ceiling high enough to improve my situation through my own hard work.

I can only speak for myself, but the current economic situation has caused my perspective to change.  Would this have ocurred if the housing market stayed the same and companies continued to hire as before?  I’m not so sure, but there is one thing I think could be the result of this economy: we may get back to some form of family values and look at things differently than we did before.  In many ways, that would make us more wealthy than we’ve been in a long time.