Take this as an observation based on my personal experience with several recessions and growth cycles over the decades.

The way you can tell we’re at the peak of the growth cycle is the generally positive social attitude towards overt displays of wealth – people driving expensive cars, wearing expensive watches and other trinkets, and so on. The social attitude is, basically, aspirational – “good for him; we’re all doing well, some are doing better than most, but we all aspire to be there”. There’s abundance of money in the system, and there’s an abundance of people having lots of money, as well. The attitude is that if you don’t have money at that point, it’s your fault.

The way you can tell we’re entering recession is that the attitude towards boastful displays of wealth grows increasingly negative – an increasing number of people either lost their jobs, or had their salary cut, or the prices grew; the pension funds went bust, some people couldn’t pay their mortgage and so lost their homes, and so on, and the attitude is that we’re all basically fucked and trying to make ends meet, and the goal is no longer to make the most money, but to survive to the other side of this. The attitude towards wealth is no longer aspirational, because it’s seen as a dream we had to abandon and will most likely never reach, so displays of opulence are seen as someone poking at our wounds, intentionally reminding us of our misery and loss, and the rich people who don’t understand that the times had changed might find themselves at the wrong end of the stick.

I’ve been noticing this souring of attitude towards fake and real displays of wealth for a while now, which, to me, signals recession, and not only recession, but widespread pain of recession, that is not being acknowledged by the media, which makes it worse because it makes people assume it’s probably just them and not everybody else, and they feel as if they should keep up a facade of opulence in order not to stick out and be seen as losers, and keeping up the facade is increasing the financial pain. So, whenever they see someone who is buying a fancy new toy to show how well they are doing, they feel this as pressure to keep the expensive pretence and hasten their financial ruin.

Usually, when it’s publicly acknowledged that we’re in a recession, there’s a collective sigh of relief because then people feel they are allowed to show signs of adversity, because it’s seen as something that happens to everybody – they can keep wearing old clothes, sell the expensive car and get an old beater, not buy wasteful trinkets as holiday presents, and so on. Even the rich people usually have enough sense to tone it down, because they don’t want to be seen as the only ones not suffering; when everybody is doing well, doing better is good, but when everybody is doing poorly, doing better might single you out for retribution.

We are in an unacknowledged recession.