Rebuild from Depression Blog

I don't really know what is worse: living in a depressive mental state or living in an economic depression. I have only lived through one and hope not to make it two. I do expect that what's worse is living in both at the same time. Let's hope we don't face that.

I checked out Google trends for the word "depression" and found that more people are searching for it and there has been a sharp increase in news reports on it. Surely the increase is the economic sort, but these times will surely give rise to the other sort as well.

We have set up our lives so that we need very little cash to scrape by and it's a darned good thing because we don't have a whole lot of it. California's economy is in the crapper and with the little cash that we have, it would appear that we have more than the state does at the moment since it is on the verge of issuing IOUs to its venders and holding back state income tax returns. Ouch. Our problem is that while we are not a direct vender of the state, we are venders of venders. Trickle down economics has an ugly side.

Knowing it was coming and being set on not going bananas in my pregnancy over things I cannot control, I actually got to work on what I am calling "a product for the new economy." It's a data product for California public schools that is priced for a school on a budget with quality unsurpassed (of course, see California Standards Test :) ). Now I need to spend my time marketing it, another project that takes me away from the blog. My point is that I have made a concerted effort to "go with the flow" and take a stab at turning lemons into lemonade. Who knows if it will work (our focus has been on custom work up to this point which really doesn't require the marketing effort), but it will busy my brain on something, an important issue for me. If my brain is focused on something productive, it cannot also be filled with anxiety. I used this strategy successfully throughout my pregnancy.

If you need food for your next meal, my strategy isn't going to help for that. But if you do find yourself anxious about the times ahead, spend some time thinking about ways to take advantage of it. You never know what you might come up with.

Technorati Tags: depression, politics, economy