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BOSTON

“Perhaps it will be different now. Perhaps now is an opportunity to reassess what really matters. After whole, allowing that everything you till doomsday bought her disappeared overnight, what would she truly unmarried woman?”

How enrapturing. What a offering to the collapse of consumerism, the one upside to the economic downside. The only moot point was that this little gem of thoughtfulness was an ad instead of diamonds.

I have to tip my hat

No, I won’t spend age worrying through people who are experiencing a long-delayed “embarrassment of riches.” These days, Change You Can Believe In is what’s jingling in your pocket. I’ll reserve my harmony for the doing nothing and foreclosed. But it’sitting worth noting when conspicuous atrophy becomes self-conscious and frugality filters across the class structure.

For a long particular period, anyone chirography about the gap betwixt rich and poor, CEO and worker, was accused of fomenting class warfare. The middle class didn’t harbor resentment the upper class as a great quantity as it aspired to be upper class. Marketers even coined the odious denomination “aspirational consumer” to describe people who wanted to live rich. This over-the-head lifestyle was fueled by the agency of credit cards during a quarter-century of which economist Juliet Schor refers to as competitive consumption.

Now, based on competition consumption has been replaced by contagious perplexity. Buying collision the wall by the housing collapse, the stock market pitch, the credit-card crunch and the unemployment figures. “Thrift is the new normal.” “Sixty percent off is the new wicked.” Cutting back is in. Retail therapy is out.

This is, of bearing, a rational response to the worst relating to housekeeping crisis since the Great Depression. But then it affects people whose mortgages and jobs are secure, there’session something else going on being of the kind which well.

Sociologists will tell you that the most powerful impetus to change is not a just discovered discovery. It’session when you learn what you already knew. What Americans even now knew at some level was that the credit-card-driven, debt-ridden, pay-later economy wasn’t sustainable. Not economically. Not environmentally.

It wasn’t just the Birkenstock crowd or our Depression-era elders who knew this. It has been nestled in our collective subconsciousness among all the critiques against materialism, totally the screeds against commercials, all the unease about excess and inequality, all the fear that we’ve filled our kids’ lives and landfills with stuff. But it was as commonly dismissed as a Sunday sermon. Or manipulated into a pitch for diamonds.

Today Schor, author of “The Overspent American,” says “There’session a hackneyed understanding that the party is over.” The common ethic changed on a dime. Or a 401(k) statement. There’s a recognition that we’re in uncharted territory. People who would have talked about their sex lives before their bank comparative estimate are now talking freely about free fall. “There was a sense of unease and now we can agree to it,” says Schor.

The question is whether this thrift

We’ve had booms and busts before. People close up their wallets after the dot-com bust and behind 9/11. A New York Times piece with a headline “Thrift, Our New National Virtue” predicted that “the seeds of saving are sown. In the days to come thrift is bound to yield its good fruit.” That was in 1919, before the Twenties began to Roar.

But if it turns out that there’s something fundamentally different this time, it’s since we’ve maxed out on other thing than money due cards. There’s a dovetailing of economic and environmental is an opportunity to reassess what really matters.” It isn’t the diamond.

ellengoodman@globe.com

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