"Good life" may soon be redefined

We skipped Copper River salmon last week.

Eating the fish has become a tradition for my family, but it's just too expensive now.

For us in many small ways, and for this country in a big way, life is changing.

My family is making the kinds of adjustments typical of middle-class Americans. We're driving less ($55 to fill a tank), buying more frozen vegetables and fewer fresh ones, bringing lunch to work more often.

On Father's Day, we ate fish and chips at Gene Coulon Park rather than going to a more expensive restaurant.

The park is in Renton, which is determined to become the new Kirkland or Bellevue.

The economy looks bright from Coulon, which is ringed by new condos and apartments. It's on the edge of The Landing, a huge development still partially under construction.

This area has boomed in recent years, but we are now feeling some of the economic bumps plaguing the rest of the country.

Or, I should say, some of us have recently started feeling it more.

There are lots of people around here for whom Copper River salmon was never an option, and others for whom price is no object.

The ends of the economic spectrum are moving further apart and the middle class is hard pressed to avoid sliding backward. That's not how it was supposed to be.

Renton aspires to move up from blue-collar because that's the American expectation.

It certainly was my aspiration. I worked and followed the rules because I wanted part of the dream.

I got part of it, too.

But real wages started declining while I was in college. I didn't notice so much when I went to work because I was doing better than the previous generation of my family.

But the slide's effects mounted. Lots of people compensated by financing their dreams with debt.

And wages are so far down now that the expectations I left home with at 18 won't all hold true for the next batch of 18-year-olds.

They're seeing American consumers hunkering down and General Motors pouring its research dollars into electric cars.

People growing up with the new realities won't just have different spending patterns, they will have different values.

What will motivate future workers? It won't be an expectation of generous pensions and ever-increasing wages.

They'll think differently about work and life, which might be a blessing. Our notion of success, in which upward mobility is demonstrated by the acquisition of bigger houses, bigger cars and more stuff, is unsustainable.

People less driven by economics might have less stuff but more balanced lives. Certainly they'll have less impact on the environment.

Maybe a less competitive society will reduce some of our inequalities. I don't know.

Living in a time of such significant transition is like standing in a stream seeing the bottom clearly until someone takes a stick and stirs up the silt. Everything will be murky until the sand settles again.

People will still aspire to live the good life, but it'll be a more modest version.

Jerry Large's column appears Monday and Thursday. Reach him at 206-464-3346 or jlarge@seattletimes.com.