Fear is a Darkroom where negatives are developed

I think I've found a cure for anxiety. Try and gather a number of things to worry about and pretty soon you'll find that you are so confused you won't be able to concentrate on anything. You'll turn from an anxious person into a mumbling idiot which may not sound like an improvement but at least gets you a nice padded cell and you'll be given lots of colored balloons to play with.

I'm about ten minutes away from the balloons at the moment. The world just seems to have become an overwhelming place and it's hard to stay calm. The news is filled with economic horror stories that could be penned by Edgar Allen Poe. My homeland seems to be suffering this more than anyone else (although Iceland and Latvia might disagree) and lurches every day towards some unstoppable Armageddon. My employer is technically bankrupt and only stays alive because the American Government can't face the appalling vista of letting it die. And all the while, the skies around Melbourne are filled with the choking dust of a hundred bush-fires, which like some rough beast is slouching ever closer towards the City.

And which of these impending disasters is worrying me most? None of them in fact, I've spent all day wondering if Arsenal will qualify for next years Champion's League and if the Lasagne I cooked at the weekend will taste as good after three days in the fridge.

We live in times that will either kill us or leave us with great stories to tell our grandkids. I used to feel cheated that our generation was the most boring since Adam and Eve. My grandfathers fought in Ireland’s war of independence and were midwives to the birth of our nation. My father was a young teenager during World War II and despite living in the relative safety of a neutral country, he has many tales of errant German bombs falling on the nearby village and dry black bread for dinner.

Our generation knew little about real drama. Of course there have been wars, famine and natural disasters on our watch, but these were always in far flung places and we could ignore them as quickly as we could turn off a television. That has all changed now of course and we have a story which will scare and astonish future generations.

When I come to tell my grandchildren about Black 09, I’ll start with economics. That was the time when the 400 year old orthodoxy of Capitalism finally collapsed. In hindsight it seems so obvious that it would falter, seeing as how it was built on a seismic fault line. We split the world into consumers and producers. The consumers paid the producers for goods and then borrowed money back from the producers in order to buy more goods.

I call this older brother economics. When I was 10 years old, I had a fascination with train sets. My Mother’s cruel solution to this longing was to buy a train set for my older brother, who at 12 years old had no interest in such things as he was developing a keener affection for narcotics and pornography. He realised however, that he could extract my measly weekly pocket money for the offer of one hour’s train time. I hungrily agreed but found myself an hour later unsated in my desire to be Thomas the Tank Engine. My only solution was to borrow from my brother against the security of next week’s pocket money.

My brother fed my voracious appetite by adding new carriages and bridges and pretty soon I owed him so much that I would still be paying him back when I was 45. He realised that I was a bad debt and decided to give me a good beating in lieu of missed payments. The fact that he used Engine number one for this purpose was painful for me on a number of levels.

That’s what childhood is for, a chance to live out and learn from the failures that adults make, in the security of a kid’s game. Unfortunately, Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher do not seem to have had older brothers.

While the world partied through the recent consumer driven boom, the Irish were up in one of the back bedrooms getting high on LCD while being sick over the guest’s coats. We Irish just can’t do anything at normal levels. Offer us a free bar at a wedding and the happy couple will be paying the bill off for 20 years. Start an Internet campaign to vote for the 20th Century’s most important person and the Irish will conspire to ensure that an obscure 3rd Division football player wins the poll.

So it is with economic booms. We couldn’t just do a normal one. We had to go out and get rip-roaring drunk and while the rest of the world now has a hangover, we Irish are in the emergency ward on an intravenous drip.

But if the world and my homeland wasn’t enough to worry about this week, I’m also faced with the dilemma of working for a company that is teetering on the edge of extinction. We’ve had more bail-outs than a lifeboat from the Titanic and the analogy of sinking ships is not out of place. We receive daily emails from the CEO in the States telling us not to panic. When you consider that he was the one that got us into this mess in the first place, it’s hard to trust his judgment. With the amount of debt the company is burdened with, it’s clear that he didn’t have an older brother either.

When faced with so many worries, we can either turn to the drink or learn that we should only concern ourselves with the things we can control. Everything else will happen anyway. As the writer Leo Buscaglia said “Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow. It only saps today of its joy”.