How I Survived the Great Financial Crisis in Good Spirits

I grew up in Wahiawā, Hawai‘i, a place that, on most days, felt comfortably safe from imminent destruction.

And yet, I couldn’t help wondering about those yellow fallout shelter placards posted on buildings all over town. What did they mean, and who were they for?

I simply had to know.

And so, as head of our school’s sixth-grade lecture program, I took it upon myself to invite an official from Civil Defense in the hope that he would come and clear up the mystery.

Oops, big mistake.

Our guest arrived a few weeks later — uniformed, crew-cutted, and enthusiastic — and proceeded to spend an entire class period talking about nuclear attacks and tsunamis, complete with disaster photos and scary stories.

Not exactly what your average eleven-year-old needs to hear.

So when the local disaster test siren wailed at high noon the next week, I freaked out, found a phone, and called my father. It was the same warning siren I’d heard every month for years, but now, thanks to the recent visit by Dr. Doom, I could now picture the end of the world, and in Technicolor, no less.

Clearly, there’s a downside to being a very curious person, and it’s no wonder that for our next speaker, I booked the local tofu maker.

A fascination with bad news

There’s just something so … compelling about Armageddon, whether natural or man-made, physical or financial. It’s so alluring, in fact, that we’ve become a nation of porn addicts — pessimism porn, that is.

Remember Kitty Genovese? Her horrific murder in 1964 is permanently stamped on our national memory, and it is the Psych 101 textbook example of “the bystander effect.” Despite the fact that her tragic death was not accompanied by the gross and wide-scale indifference initially reported in the press, the myth is alive and well.

Or how about Orson Welles’s 1938 radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds, an event that (supposedly) sparked a massive panic because people thought Martians were invading Grover’s Mill in New Jersey?

Turns out, most people either caught on fast to the joke or weren’t even tuned to that particular broadcast. And yet, “the panic” is part of our national lore. (According to historian Elizabeth McLeod, “The exaggeration of the War of the Worlds story can be interpreted as the print media’s revenge for being badly scooped during the previous month” [on coverage of the Munich crisis].)

It wasn’t time to hoard gold

In 2009, this toxic media laser of impending doom was pointed squarely at the financial markets. We couldn’t get enough titillatingly bleak news reports breathlessly served up by the media. The very same media that have an agenda beyond solely reporting all the news that’s fit to print.

You don’t sell dead trees with headlines that read, “All is well, citizens; return to your homes.”

Maybe it’s because people on Wall Street are used to being envied rather than demonized, but the number of otherwise sane people in the business telling me about the size of their personal gold stashes because “this isn’t just a financial crisis but a financial Armageddon, you know” was ridiculous.

If they’d told me about stockpiling guns, then I’d have really worried. Think of all the destruction we finance types wrought onto the world just by using Excel. Imagine if we had had — gasp — weaponry?

There’s a difference between what happened in 2008/9 and those that require action of the bomb-shelter-building, gold-stashing, sewing-diamonds-into-hems sort.

… For my ex-husband’s grandparents, it was when guys in brown shirts were looting their house in Düsseldorf on Kristallnacht. His grandfather was a decorated WWI vet (the Iron Cross), and he thought the craze for brown clothing and goose-stepping would wane.

… For the father of my then fifteen-year-old son’s soccer teammate, it was when a coup d’état in Gambia meant that he, as a provincial governor, got thrown in jail after the requisite beating by thugs.

But for most of us, most of the time, we weren’t even close.

So here’s the advice I gave back then, in case it comes in handy. If you are suffering from a bad case of financial-end-of-the-world-itis, print out my six-step recovery plan below and tape it to the wall of your fallout shelter:

Go on a one-week media diet. Okay, maybe not during market hours. The point is, paying attention is not the same as being emotionally contaminated. Unnecessary and compulsive consumption of a high-fear media diet isn’t going to change reality, but it will affect your mood. If you weren’t so bummed out, you might even notice that there aren’t any thugs knocking on your door.

Hang out with happy people. Turns out that happiness is extremely contagious, and if you hang out with happy people, you get happier as a result (the opposite is also true; see #1 above). Or become a vector for happiness yourself and spread good cheer among others.

Watch Marx Brothers movies. Read funny books. Go to comedy clubs. Do laughter yoga. Norman Cousins wrote extensively about the healing powers of laughter, a fact that has been well-documented in study after study. It’ll even lower your blood pressure, for starters.

Write down three things that you’re grateful for, every day for one month. It will help to “accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, latch on to the affirmative, and get rid of Mr. In-between,” as that old Johnny Mercer ditty goes. Heck, why not listen to it after waking up and before going to bed every day?

Donate time or money to others. It’ll take your mind off your gold hoard and improve the state of the universe. Not to mention, connect you with the well-documented mental and health benefits of altruism.

Smile more, even if you don’t feel like it. Somehow the physical act of smiling triggers happy brain chemicals. Which makes you feel happier. Which causes you to smile more. Which triggers more chemicals. Pretty soon, people will want to hang with you (even though you’re in finance), and that warm glow will once again return to your heart.

My promise to you: Dr. Doom didn’t guarantee survival back in 1973, but I survived the 2008/9 financial mess better in better spirits than most, if only because happiness and fear-induced paralysis are mutually exclusive.

And if it turns out that we do need to start growing our own food, I’ll even teach you how to make tofu out of soybeans … being curious has its upside, too.

Photo credit: “FALLOUT SHELTER” by jasoneppink is licensed under CC BY 2.0