Obviously you can't ignore what's going on. Your investments are worth far less than they were (heaven help you if you were in a hedge fund betting on CDSs). Your employer has laid off (or is about to) a significant number of staff. Credit markets are still frozen, but even if they weren't, you're thinking maybe you should cut back on debt. Your house is worth less than it was this time last year. Sales of almost everything are down enough that you don't actually have to measure them to see that. Speculators are betting against oil prices for a change, because they don't see any demand moving forward. The national debt (at least here in my country) is going up. Times are bleak. Is that's what's bothering you bunky?
Well then get up off your duff and pay attention! As depressing as that last paragraph may have seemed, this is the seminal moment of opportunity that has occurred in my lifetime. Things will be tough, and things will change, no doubt. But opportunity lives today all around us. Not just opportunity, but tremendous opportunity. While others are battening down the hatches and trying to hide, the ones that get out there and work at it are the ones that are going to succeed and determine the change. I hate to parrot cliches, but it really is the time to be the change you want to see.
Your investments and house are only worth what you can sell them for. Forget about the paper loss; paper gains and losses are just that: paper. No reason to cry over that. Tomorrow they'll be worth something else yet again. You can obsess over that and get depressed, or you can free yourself from the mental investment and move your brain onto more productive thoughts.
Out of however long a recession we're about to have will come change. You have two choices. You can wait until the recession is over and wait to see what the change was, or you can start making the change you want right now. (Lord I hope this little pep talk doesn't result in any divorces ;~). Use your brain and start thinking about the way your future ought to be. Follow your passion. Make things happen that aren't happening. With failure you can't control happening all around you are you really still going to be afraid of your own possible failure?
I get asked a lot by high school and college students (more so just before graduation than any other time of the year) about "how do I become a full time photographer?" Well, that's not hard to answer: carry a camera and photograph all the time. "But how do I make money doing it?" Ah, the money question. I usually turn this around. Think about someone you know who's truly happy at what they do. Now ask them how they ended up making money at it. More often than not you'll get a very long story about how they didn't make money doing it, at least not initially. But curiously, somehow they figured out how to follow their passion and make a living doing it. And all the detours they took, they'll tell you that those were times when they weren't following their passion. Now go ask someone who isn't happy if they followed their passion. The answer is universally "no."
This is the reason why I cringe when I hear a parent tell a child what they should be, or try to talk them out of what they think the child shouldn't be. The fastest way to make someone unhappy, rececession or not, is to tell them they have to do something they don't want to do. In my experience, unhappy people are not productive people.
Most of you are unhappy right now. Take your moment, cry if you have to, but shrug it off and get going again. Your company just decided to outsource your job. Great! Start the company that your previous company will outsource the job to. You'll end up making more money that way (though you actually might have to do the work this time ;~). Your company cut off all overtime work. Great, you can use that now extra time to start a new venture, a new hobby, fix the house up so it will be worth more, or whatever you haven't been doing. (Oops. My ex-wife and ex-girlfriends just called. They say you should spend more time with the family if you have more time. Silly women ;~)
I think you catch my drift now. I hope you do. While I've kept this at a personal level, the opportunity before us is much bigger than just improving your own life. As a society, we could use the opportunity to get serious about our planet's health, for instance. If that's what you want to help happen, you've got my support; let me know how I can help.
In short, yes, the shock of the financial meltdown certainly hurt and put us all in a glum mood. It may not be completely over, but that's not overly important, actually. We now know the world is a bit different than it was, but it's time to climb out from under our down comforters bought with credit cards, get dressed in our best work clothes obtained by refinancing the mortgage, walk out of devalued houses and make a recovery happen the way we want it to happen.
Damned if I remember the last time I gave a pep talk, but if you didn't listen, I'll have to do it again. I'm not going to fail at this...