Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Liquid life

Recently I saw this wonderful presentation on ted.com about the new economic reality and new business and consumer trends. Although business in nature, this presentation really struck cord in me, especially when it came to a concept of a "liquid life" ( no, it's not a liquid lunch for you college frats)
This new emerging phenomenon has something to do with people realizing that there's no intrinsic value in "things" ( i.e. houses/cars/that new set of golf clubs etc.), and choose to lead the things-free life, being ready to move to new, better and bigger... not things, but opportunities unencumbered by huge mortgages and deep entrenchment in your particular place of work or residence. This emerging class of people believe in liquidity of their life and money.
And (I would add ) it would be increasingly difficult to sell these people the good old Wall St. notion of giving someone all of their actual hard-earned "retirement" money for 30 years for the promise to be "prepared" for the old age.
Most doctors I know are far from any kind of unconventional thinking, so I won't expect this idea to grasp most of us any time soon.
Time will tell..
Will be happy to know your thoughts on that.

2 comments:

drsam said...

I've not seen this TED presentation yet. Do you remember the name of the speaker or the name of the presentation?

FWIW, from your description of the "liquid life" concept, I agree with you that most doctors are not likely to go for it.

That is a mistake on the part of many of them I think.

Docblogger said...

Dr. Sam,

Here it is
http://www.ted.com/talks/john_gerzema_the_post_crisis_consumer.html

The speaker is John Gerzema. The liquid life concept is explained about 6:30 min into presentation.