Change In Plans

This short post is about the strange sensation of watching the great financial crisis of 2008 from far away.

For the last three weeks I have been reading the New York Times and Yahoo Finance feverishly on my BlackBerry.

It has been strange to watch the drama/trauma of the meltdown through this five-square-inch lens of abstraction, while surrounded by foreign places and people who are unaware and/or indifferent. Yesterday’s failed bailout and equity-market implosion did not seem to register with the holidaymakers and boat crews of Fethiye, Turkey.

We were living in South Africa as the Internet bubble (inflated and) burst, and I felt as though I watched it all through a Bloomberg terminal and calls to business-school friends. It would clearly have been a more visceral experience if we had continued to live in Palo Alto.

On September 11, 2001, We were on vacation with friends in Italy. We were overjoyed with our one-year-old son, and we had just found out we were pregnant (with the baby that we lost several months later). We watched the coverage of the 9/11 attacks on Italian television, and tried to imagine what our friends and neighbors in Manhattan were going through.

The current financial crisis is quite different, of course, from both other eventss. That said, once again it feels as though we are watching history through an unusual medium, rather than being there, where we should be. We are emotionally and geographically detached.

I am definitely glad that we accepted a low-ball bid, and sold our house in New Jersey in June. We would have otherwise gotten creamed, I think.