The Recession Chic Lie

When hipsters find themselves without lots of money, it's only natural that poverty be deemed hip. And it has -- witness the recent flood of articles about formerly craven yuppies re-evaluating their lives and deciding that wealth doesn't matter, the pronouncements that conspicuous consumption is out and cocooning in, the 180-degree turnabout of a workaholic culture that's suddenly awake to the joys of empty afternoons.

"Why Its Chic to Be Cheap" proclaims the cover of December's "Details."

"A Time for Reflection and Perfecting the Chicken Fricassee," announces an article in the Oct. 7 New York Times.

An article in the Dec. 28 San Francisco Chronicle introduces Brian Chechoway, a 27-old corporate guy who lost his $95,000 a year job but found self-actualization as a club DJ. "Unemployment has its rewards," the article said. "'I partied my ass off,' he admitted. 'It was very liberating, not having to wake up for work.'"

The sentiment is echoed by an unemployed art director quoted in New York Magazine saying, "I feel the possibility of it being much better. I won't have to work my butt off. I don't need to dress to impress anyone. I'll be able to take advantage of galleries and concerts ... And I won't have to get on that damned subway every morning."

Ah, freedom! Liberation from the straightjacketing schedules of the boom years, from the siren temptations of filthy lucre! Bohemia, it seems, is back.

For people who lamented the demise of boho ideal in the 1990s (and the corporate perversion of its memory), this sudden resurrection is welcome. Surely it's a good thing if talking fervently through the night becomes more popular than coding maniacally till dawn. If chatter about stock options and IPOs vanishes from art openings and theater lobbies, if $800 boots begin to seem grotesque instead of insouciant, if work assumes its place as a part of life instead of the absolute aim of existence, of course that's all to the best.

The coffee house has resumed its rightful place before the boardroom as the scintillating center of twentysomething culture. The Dec. 23 New York Times reports on the new jobless demimonde, "A stream of customers lined up for lattes and bagels. Men with rumpled hair flipped through magazines, and young women in yoga pants and sneakers caught up over coffee, some sitting at tables by the fireplace, others on the benches outside." The story goes on to explain this "midweek tea party" -- "With the economy in recession, and 97,600 jobs lost in New York City in October and November alone, a peculiar kind of café society has emerged, at least in one thin substratum of the suddenly unemployed -- college educated young people without dependents, and whose only previous association with hard times was a grandmother who reused tinfoil because that's what she did during World War II."

Alternatives to rabid careerism are socially acceptable again, and that's very nice. But as the articles pile up, as talk of the new simplicity becomes a locust-like drone (and subscriptions to Simplicity Magazine spike along with Soldier of Fortune), all these sanguine tales of slackerdom start seeming like a smoke screen. The thing is, those who welcome joblessness for the chance it gives them to reassess their lives are a very thin substratum indeed, and the disproportionate play they're getting in the news gives an increasingly distorted picture of what it really means to see your income disappear. In the mainstream media, unemployment has mutated into a hot new trend. Welcome to the world's first lifestyle recession.

That's not to say that the big papers haven't been covering ordinary people's pain. Two weeks ago the Associated Press offered a good piece on out-of-work East Chicago Steelworkers, the Washington Post ran an excellent story in December called "Unions Step Up Their Services After Layoffs," and the New York Times' Louis Uchitelle has made a consistent effort to include a wide variety of workers in his reporting on the recession. But such journalism is dwarfed by mountains of copy about the recession's impact on fashion, leisure and the meaning of life, a tide of stories whose utter detachment from the circumstances of most people's lives can only be called surreal. "In Rough Times, the Rich Go Yachting," ran on the front page of the New York Times Business Section last Thursday.