New seriousness and the boom in cycling

Well, it looks like it might be happening. The economy has crashed, lifestyles are threatened, and everything is serious again.

Unless the crisis lasts though, this seriousness will go as soon as shares and houses perk up [which would be pretty boring]. Much more fun if a proper big fundamental change is underway - fortunately that's what I think is going on.

As ever with cultural change, we can understand this change at various levels from the frames within which people gain status and display it, to actual details of how people behave. If the different levels start to confirm each other then there is a decent chance that something is happening and we can start to make predictions.

So, first up, are the frames through which we understand status any different? I say YES. For the last 15 years we have been able to gain and display economically. Wealth accrued to property owners and they spent that wealth on trinkets and, latterly, on buying experiences like diving, skiing, or authentic holidays to obscure places. The thing to remember is that although the nineties felt a bit different, people were doing exactly the same as they had during the first proper flaunting boom of the eighties. Patrick Bateman would have felt perfectly at home in Islington.

That isn't going to be possible any more. That's not to say there won't be an economic component - people will still be richer than others. The first thing is that people aren't going to be as rich as they were for quite a while. Their rapid progress through better and better wine, food, holidays, and furniture will have stopped and reversed. So, after that, who is going to celebrate their rediscovery of the good things they first enjoyed five years ago?

The second thing is that we were already running out of ways to differentiate ourselves - that's why the really rich were starting to look so daft. And even among the middle classes, the number of people going skiing and traveling round the world means that simple experience has lost a bit of its cache. Inevitably, then, people have to find new obscure experiences or they have to go for experiences that you need to work towards. After all, if you have to train for six months before you do something it does rather reduce the number of people that are going to do it.

So, there are two good reasons why expertise and time are going to become more important than cash when it comes to status. And also why British success in the olympics wasn't the real reason why I have just ordered a new road bike (picture above).

Next up, I'm going to write about how this change together with ICT's are changing the way that young people relate to subcultures.