Oh Boy! A Misery Index!

Anything with "Misery" in the title is sure to draw me in like a moth to flame, so when I saw the Wall Street Journal has come up with a misery index, I was sure to read it: WSJ Misery Index.

As it turns out, we in the Seattle area are pretty miserable, which is reassuring, because I was pretty sure I had been singled out unfairly. So I read this article and, as you would expect, it's a big disappointment because it's all about economic measures of misery. Don't get me wrong, I find economics as dismal a read as anything. Every economic nugget I read just reinforces my notion that everything is going to hell even more irrevocably than before. But this Misery index brings the "meh." and this is why:

So it focuses on three things: cost of gas, home prices, and unemployment. While these are all miserable things, they aren't really that terrible, well unemployment is, but the other two are really a folly metric.

Let's start with gas prices. Driving your own car is inefficient as hell. Going all the places I have to go is inefficient as hell, and If I really looked at it, I wouldn't need to go to those places, I could just cut them out of the equation. Send the girl to the crappy afterschool care program instead of the nice one with the pool. Quit farting around with kid sports. Quit taking them to tutors and counseling. Tell them to rub some dirt on it if they're hurt. Those weekend trips up to the ski lodge? forget about it. The point is that the pain you feet from gas prices is self inflicted, based on folly, vanity, or whatever compels us to do these things we do.

Home prices? Cry me a river. It doesn't matter unless you are selling one. If you're looking to buy, then it's a happy circumstance. Looking to trade one for another? Well, you won't get as much for the one you sell, and you won't pay as much for the one you buy. Underwater? Overextended? Don't reach so far next time. See the thing about owning a house is this: the goal should be to own it, free and clear. It's not an investment. It's not a source of capital. It's securing a place for yourself to live. Ideally, a place you can't get kicked out of. If you're not interested in that, home ownership is not for you.

Rising home prices didn't really make me happy. Oh sure, it was nice to see the assessment at so much more than I owed, but it was hollow money. I couldn't get it. If I sold, I would have to move, and that's not something I'm interested in. If I borrowed against it, I would have to pay it back. The only real effect of rising home prices was on the taxes I pay. So yeah, let them fall. Let the people that value home ownership for what it is buy homes. Let the others do something more suited to their values. And please God, let it run up to crazy land just before I have to sell.

So about that unemployment. Yeah, it's pretty miserable to be unemployed, but reflecting back on own my time as a surplus person, it wasn't the worst thing that ever happened to me. It was actually a personally productive time. I lost some weight, I read a lot of books, learned a lot of new things, built some furniture, and had some new experiences. I can't say the time was a complete loss. I'd actually be kind of happy to be out of work now. I mean I could be happier, particularly if I was better prepared for it. (Being a pessimist means that your notion of economic strain is having less that a years salary stashed away in some emergency fund)

But that's the thing: misery doesn't come about as a result of a poor economy. Misery comes from a lack of preparation. The economists should measure that.

So are we miserable in Seattle? Nah. Just spoiled.