Why Don’t You Care About the Recession Anymore?

by Adil Dhalla (@CreativityKTR)
We began to wonder when attendance at the Creative Club began declining. Was it the beginning of the end for our organization? After months of writing, meeting, connecting, collaborating and building a community, the decline countered what we understood and expected. It isn’t us we were told (the first fear), it was the recession.

When we started our meet ups, the recession was new, its course and impact uncertain. Now it appears that many of the questions have been answered. We are not heading to a depression, for example, and if you are from the creative working class you’re job is reasonably safe. Safer, certainly, than people from labor-based or immigrant communities, neither of which ever had a presence in our community to begin with.

Perhaps, it’s as simple as people have had time to get over it or that our media has moved on to saucier stories and taken our attention with it. Depending on where you live, there have been enough significant distractions whether it’s the embarrassing strike in Toronto, the fires raging out west or the polarizing health care debate down south.

It’s a bittersweet topic because while you never want a good thing to end, the mandate of our group is that we would be contributing to our own demise. The question is, has creativity (or anything really) killed the recession or do we just not care anymore? I’d be okay with the former as we have evolved by creating the My City Lives project. In other words, we will continue to embody the spirit of CKTR for a long time to come.

But, with unemployment rising and most of the stimulus dollars still waiting to flow forward, it seems premature and insensitive to call the recession over. Or perhaps this thinking is correct and while the recession might be over, our new struggle is the recovery.

It would be valuable to know what others think – do you still care about the recession?