Recession 2.0

we could all probably stand to eat more beans

this could be you, gathering delicious pothole water in Utah

There are still a few spots in my Utah trips this fall! Decompress with other women, trans and non-binary people in the beautiful dez. People really like these trips. I’m no longer driving five hours each way to pick the hikers up in Las Vegas but! I will put everyone in a whatsapp group so people can coordinate sharing a rental car. It will work out I promise. Details are here. And if you have any questions about my trips feel free to comment on this post, or email me at carrotquinn4@gmail.com!

A saw a tiktok where someone predicted that recession trends from the early 2000s are going to reemerge, now that we’re in recession 2.0- being vegan (because beans are cheap), not spending money, riding bikes, walking everywhere. I did these things in the early 2000s and now, looking back, I’m not even sure if I realized at the time that there was a recession going on- my friends and I were just obsessed with not having money and not using money, because we hated capitalism and thought that we could somehow not participate in it while living within it, which of course turned out not to be true. We bought very little, didn’t own cars and ate so many beans. I actually wish I still ate that many beans. Sometimes I look around and think- what happened to all the beans? Huge pots of black beans, green lentils, red lentils. Sometimes they’d turn out amazing, when you soaked them beforehand and caramelized the onion, and sometimes they were just ok- a little crunchy and the amount of cumin was all wrong. But everyone was still like, yum, time for beans!

I do own a twenty pound sack of dried pinto beans, in my plastic costco tote of prepper food. I chose the “switch it out every six months” style of prepping, since I feel too lazy to vacuum seal everything in mylar bags (I am so impressed with you Nic Antoinette!). This means that in six months I’ll have to take out that bag of beans and actually start eating it (after replacing it with a new one). I think about this often- while I do on occasion crack open a can of the refried, when was the last time I made a giant pot of beans, or lived in a house crowded enough and enthusiastic about legumes enough to consume said giant pot of beans? When I was twenty-three? I couldn’t help but wonder- do my friends even eat fiber anymore? Do I even eat fiber anymore?

In my twenties I thought we were living off beans, cabbage and dumpstered bread by choice, but actually there wasn’t much money going around in those days- there were no jobs to speak of (you could apply for months and never hear back) and we paid the bills in all sorts of random ways- medical studies, selling vintage clothes on ebay, working the beet harvest, trimming weed, and other things I won’t mention here. Rent and bulk goods at the co-op were cheap but cash dollars were scarce, so I suppose there was a recession going on after all. This recession feels opposite- there are lots of jobs but inflation is so bad that it’s hard to find one that pays enough, and every morning the cost of living is higher than the day before. If I could choose between types of recessions, I would choose the first- money just kind of not being around, instead of this inflation, which feels terrifying, because we don’t know when it will stop.

I think about the housing market a lot. Years ago, when I first saw rents start to rise, in certain hip cities initially and then everywhere, like a cancer, I thought that rent existed separately from everything else but I realize now that prices are all intwined with each other, like an ecosystem of economics, and that rent, these days, seems to be the first marker of inflation. So if a one bedroom apartment in your city goes from $1200 to $2200, the price of everything else will go up too, until 2200 is the new 1200, and only then will the inflation stop. And if the rent continues to rise, so does the inflation, like some horrifying race to the bottom.

I’m tired of thinking about all this stuff. We all are. It’s like the way my hair is thinning with perimenopause- I’m fine with some of my hair falling out, I know that’s inevitable with aging, but I just want to know when it will stop. Where will I end up, because right now it feels like it’s going to keep escalating forever, until I’m bald. When the dust settles, what will I be working with.

To be real, if we all cared as much as we tell ourselves we do about the earth and sustainability and all that, we’d all be living a sort of lifestyle that looks a lot like abject poverty- no cell phones or other tech, no cars, no consumer goods shipped from far away, no out of season foods, no traveling on planes. We’d be eating the same shit all the time, bored to death of it, our brains juicy from lack of stimulation, our backs bent from farm labor. We’d be really into weaving lace or singing in harmony or writing songs on homemade string instruments. The soles of our feet would be tough from walking barefoot and we’d probably feel trapped in whatever corner of the world we lived in. But our carbon footprint would be smaller. Would it be enough to stop climate change? Probably not. But if inflation goes far enough maybe we’ll get there whether we like it or not. And then we’ll finally eat beans again.

I’m still dreaming about buying land in Fairbanks so I don’t have to worry about my rent ever going up again but the dream is starting to feel silly and unrealistic. I mean, crazier things have happened for sure, but the cheap land is expensive in other ways and the other land is just plain expensive. I keep asking myself what I could give up- could I live in an extremely small cabin? Without electricity? On a trail and I would need a four-wheeler to get to my cabin? In the part of town that’s just junkyards? Farther from town?

What even is stability? How much stability is each of us allowed? I am but one small life on this planet with eight billion humans- when am I just being greedy? I have so much already, so much more than most humans had for most of human history. Here I am balanced on the end of it all, having almost lived out my entire life; what else is there to even want?

Anyway. It’s feeling summery in Fairbanks these days; warm blue sky, the snow all gone, the leaves on the trees the size of squirrels’ ears. In the evening the sewing nook in my cabin is flooded with light, which works for me because that’s when I like to sew. I realized recently that my hobbies make up the bulk of my personality; aside from my projects, there’s not much to me. I feel fine with that though. I like to be in my own world inside my brain, doing my little creative tasks. I have always been this way, since my earliest memories. I’ve been making more bags and hoodies lately, and watching youtube tutorials on using inkscape to make sewing patterns- it would be so cool to be able to make patterns. A pattern for a bag is fairly straightforward, if a lot of computer work, but a clothing pattern is more complicated- if I make a hoodie in my size, for example, I have to figure out how to make it in other sizes too, and include that in the pattern. I’ve watched some online tutorials on this and honestly the math and geometry of it melts my brain. There’s a merino dress I designed in winter that I’d like to figure out how to make more sizes of so I found a pattern for a similar dress shape online and ordered it- if I can just lay out the paper pieces of this similar pattern on the ground and see the differences in shape between the sizes with my actual eyeballs, I think the process of sizing up and down might start to make sense to me. It’s interesting how there’s learning from words and symbols and learning by vibes and feel- following a pattern of drawn lines and written instructions vs. holding an item in your hand and inspecting how it’s put together and then trying to copy it. Both of these kinds of learning feel important for garment and bag construction. I want to learn it all. I want to go back in time and start learning years ago. Barring that, I suppose I’ll just keeping learning now, and see how far I can get. It certainly makes existence more interesting.

That’s all for now,

Carrot