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How to Downsize Yourself

This article is more than 10 years old.

The Wall St Journal has a fascinating piece on its tech blog - sorry I can't find a date for it - called Reinventing the Two Wheeler. Why is it important? The humble bicycle is fast becoming an object of innovation and ingenuity. A decade back the bike was for militant greens or the gym. Today it is being redesigned for utility and work. We need to do reconfigure everyday objects, and our lifestyles, as our world downsizes around us. In fact a major filament of hope and opportunity is how much remains to be done to make our everyday world better and more appropriate to need. Why not start with the bike?

Such bicycles would need to carry bigger loads, says Nancy Keates at the WSJ—from luggage to social-networking apparatus—and may even need to be equipped with mini-engines for times when mileage overtakes leg muscles (or a commuter doesn't want to get his suit all sweaty).

The WSJ was reporting on the Oregon Manifest, a competition to design bicycles for a varied market that requires more than just a spinning class in the fresh air (Pictured is the “University of Oregon’s prototype which won the Oregon Manifest Best Student Team Award”).

The point is the bike is not only being perceived as a necessary alternative, it is also drawing human ingenuity back to the simplest of objects. As the WSJ puts it, time to put the Range Rover away and get on your bike.

Designer Jens Martin Skibstead has been pushing a new bike paradigm for a decade now. His dream, for bikes to:

....compete directly with cars by constructing bikes who are so beautiful that they imbue our cities with new meaning, even as they make us healthier. Biomega bikes – and the trendsetters who ride them – have the ability to transform the world into a more beautiful place, and to blend our dreams for the future with the needs of the present.

The winning bike in the Oregon Manifest- above - was not all utility - it also has an iPhone cradle with navigation and entertainment options conveniently available!

Bikes are one way we can downsize ourselves with pride. And more of us need to, at least on the way to a new and more vibrant economy some time in the future.

A study in Ireland earlier this year showed that 25% of people there are  left with just $100 per month in disposable income after all necessities were met.

Over the next decade or so a new global middle class will emerge, with estimates of its size varying from 1.2 billion to 4 billion people. The common thread across the nations that make up that new global middle class is that after all essentials are taken care of it will have a disposable household income of approximately $100 per month.

In other words about the same as the downsized population of countries like Ireland.

Ingenuity is becoming more focused on what it means to live on that kind of disposable income. Corporates like Nokia began configuring their products for that audience three years back, driving the price of smartphones down below the $75 mark.

Yes, we've been right to celebrate Apple and the iPhone but low cost phones in India and Africa are having a more significant long term impact. And the convergence of income levels holds important lessons - companies or individuals that can grasp the opportunity of lower incomes will have five to six times the market to aim at. Think of that convergence.

Household debt reached more than 120% of disposable income in UK, Canada, the US and Japan by the time the financial crisis struck in 2008.

The protests on Wall Street this past week reflect the pain of downsizing your lifestyle to repay debt in an economy that is unlikely to grow susbtantially before mid-decade. In the UK yesterday the Institute for Fiscal Studies said average incomes will not rise before 2015 and even then will rise only slowly (probably only to be eroded by inflation).

I've written about the consequences of these changes before. However much we want to cling on to the values of the 1990s and 2000s there is a potentially more exciting but at the same time more confusing future ahead.

On the one hand people are being laid off, often from executive roles, at a time when corporate profits are increasing (by the way, the article here on Forbes yesterday by Deborah Jacobs, What to Say On LinkedIn When You've Been Laid off, has been shared an astonishing 11,000 times on LinkedIn).

On the other hand many corporations have palpable deficiencies in expertise. In the American energy sector, for example, over 30% of employees are due to retire before mid-decade. In the auto sector American management capability has been so squeezed that America no longer has a role in key growth areas like mechatronics.

These expertise deficiencies are not simply a result of a new division of labor between America and China. They are not problems that can be solved without significant brainpower at the the policy level. In fact you could argue that the biggest policy challenge of the next 20 years is how to re-engineer expertise.

In the meantime people need to think how they can innovate their lifestyles and what they can contribute to a different expenditure and acquisition profile.

Just as street food has come to replace restaurant eating for many people, bikes will grow as a status symbol, new urban leisure pursuits will replace vacations, and self-sufficiency will grow in attractiveness, as a cadre of talented people is lost to the corporate labor pool.

Will this be an interregnum in personal lifestyles during the restructuring of employment? Or are these changes permanent?

No individual can hang around to find out.

Based on what we're beginning to see in Ireland though I would suggest people are not averse to adopting new priorities, under difficult circumstances:

  • Incorporating lifestyle innovations in sport and leisure in place of vacations - the urban kayak phenomenon
  • Increasing interest, reward and satisfaction from routine tasks like food preparation, food growing, food exchanges - like the windowfarm
  • Downsizing from the restaurant to street food, evoking the developing world in the street food of highly developed cities
  • Active pursuit of health prevention (OnStar for the body) as a way of offsetting personal health costs
  • Engaging in personal expression through past times like voice training and singing - turning to personal performance as a leisure pursuit and as a potential career confidence builder
  • Pursuing leisure as a potential source of income - the Kindle effect
  • And of course fuel cost reduction through driving less, looking to avoid the commute, buying bicycles
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