Nope…not a Christian “that’s the way it ought to be” post. While I love Christmas, it’s special BECAUSE it comes around once a year. There have been plenty of fictional stories, including Disney’s take on this with the nephews of Donald Duck. Huey, Louie and Dewey wish for Christmas to be every day, and they get their wish to ruinous effect. Mostly, they come to hate the day, realizing subtly that they are missing the point anyway.
Thomas Friedman touched on that missing point in his 2008 book That Used To Be Us. Friedman was taking the nation to task seven years ago, and things have only gotten worse. The gist of it is similar to what I have written about the nation being addicted to ease and luxury. We have lost the understanding that everyday not only could not be Christmas, it SHOULD not be. That there is an inherent good to work, to struggle, to sacrifice, to living on a budget. Look at how Friedman said it:
In the early 1980s, around the time Ronald Reagan became President and Wall Street’s great modern bull market began, we started gambling (and winning!) and thinking magically. From 1980 to 2007, the median price of a new American home quadrupled. The Dow Jones industrial average climbed from 803 in the summer of 1982 to 14,165 in the fall of 2008. From the beginning of the ‘80s through 2007, the share of disposable income that each household spent servicing its mortgage and consumer debt increased 35%. Back in 1982, the average household saved 11% of its disposable income. By 2007 that number was less than 1%. The same zeitgeist made gambling ubiquitous: until the late ‘80s, only Nevada and New Jersey had casinos, but now 12 states do, and 48 have some form of legalized betting. It’s as if we decided that Mardi Gras and Christmas are so much fun, we ought to make them a year-round way of life.
Recent data points out this changing economic world when one looks at expenditures of food spending. My friend Matt Smith pointed out that “eating out has surpassed spending money on groceries.” So, since at least the 1990s (maybe late 1980s), we have raised a generation that doesn’t really know how to cook at home. At the risk of sounding sexist, this is largely due to the two-income household. Naturally, someone who works all day comes home very tired, at least mentally, and the idea of cooking has become seen as laborious or onerous. Not picking at women…just acknowledging that cooking can be a task. But that then is part of the point Friedman is getting at. We want it to be Mardi Gras all the time where someone else does the work of cooking for me.
To be clear, I enjoy eating out as much as the next person, and we probably do so every other week (every week if you include lunches during work). But, doing so multiple times a week not only cost a lot and puts people’s budgets under strain, it also is evidence of how we are drifting as a culture away from embracing, even celebrating hard work, into a culture that is addicted to ease and luxury. Thus, we have also created a culture that believes debt is natural and normal, just like paying a car payment forever. And, we’ve removed all stigma and penalty (mostly) for defaulting on debt…so, it has become a sense of “you are a fool if you not spending whatever you want regardless of the debt you get into.”
Regardless of your take on eating out or on carrying some debt, the point as we roll into 2016 is that it is still true that diligent effort, consistent work is the path to success. I see it every semester in students who succeed and, tragically, in those who fail. You want to be among the successes. Note, that word success is NOT a word about financial wealth or popularity or “likes” but is about how you manage your life. Be the person who understands it’s not Christmas every day, and thus you get up leaning into the work of the day, of the week.