Should I be scared?

I talk to hundreds of people every month around the country who have varying dgress of success and failure in their job search. A few are lucky enough to be ready for retirement and didn't lose it all in the recent Wall Street meltdown. Others have a couple of months severance, live in a relatively prosperous parts of the country (Texas and North Carolina) and don't seem to be aware of the economic nightmare we're in right now.

But if you're aware and getting scared, don't. It doesn't help; it doesn't change anything. One thing for sure: change is on the way and change is never comfortable, at least until it shakes out it's flaws and comes to rest in full form, useful and practical and maybe even fun. 

But this won't happen without creative, open-minded, opportunistic people who keep themselves open to these changes and how they affect others and where the opportunities are to make a decent living. And that's where the big change will come. We must stop thinking about getting rich. It may be a long time before we know what it will look like. But a decent living, including savings (safe and conservative savings) is on the way if we keep ourselves open to it. We will probably learn to build smaller houses and build them closer to each other. We will learn how to save, even if it's small amounts at a time. We will learn how to take better care of our resources. Our environmental resources are limited and so our our everyday living resources. We will learn how to be more alive by living better lives, by looking ourselves in the mirror and finding ourselves able to be at peace with what's reflected back.