The talk of the town, every village and the entire country is about recession and it is obvious that everyone fears it as a bad thing. The speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Peolosi, wouldn’t even utter the word, let alone the presence or absence of it: “I don’t like to use the word …” But a recession is an economic phenomenon-not a Frankenstein or a Martian that will physically obliterate us if we say the magic word-just hard times for the wallet and hard times at work.

Curse me: I, for one, believe a severe recession is a good thing and entirely timely.

Societies’ addiction to free money and complacency is worse and difficult to cure than an individual’s addiction to psychotropic substances. The fact that lowered interest rates sparked a lending binge to credit unworthy customers who staged themselves in a house simply to speculate, is in itself an unwanted activity requiring correction. Economists call it “mean reversion,” a fancy term for getting back to normal levels. Sure, house values go up and go down but historically houses were meant as places to live and raise a family and not for the purpose of speculating. If only those people who were really interested in living for a longer term bought houses in the past years, would house prices have sky rocketed-50% increases in some cities in the past five years. Is the influx of speculators alone the cause of the bubble? Mostly, but we all were speculating one way or another. Full-blown speculators are not the only ones causing the problem: it includes those that took a loan on the house assuming its inflated value to sustain into eternity.

It is even those of us that upped the standard of our individual lives deluded by the good times of those who themselves were in a delusion. Banks that lent-and those that continued to keep these loans on their own books-fattened their profits with fees, higher returns and were banking on resetting rates that ticked like a time bomb. Banks are suffering their own comeuppance. The economic downtrend cannot be blamed singularly on sub prime borrowers, though they played a major causal and precipitating role. If your bearings were straight and your spending was within limits, this recession will pass by you with envy.

The Consumer Sentiment survey from the University of Michigan reported sentiment levels at 70.8, compared to historic highs of 112 at the peak of dot-com bubble. We are now back at the 1993 levels when Bill Clinton was running against George Bush Sr. largely around the “It’s the economy stupid” platform. The era of historically low interest rates beginning in 2002 combined with an extended period of low inflation and overall unemployment rates at 4% have lulled our economic senses into a deep coma making us into consumptive maniacs. Consumption itself may not be bad-till we reach the dire straits predicted by Thomas Malthus-but addictive consumption aided by an as-yet unknown future income (debt) has a questionable certainty. To put this debt in perspective here are a few numbers: Americans owe a trillion dollars in debt to credit card companies. Even if all 320 million resident Americans had a credit card-which is impossible considering those under 18, illegal residents, convicted and serving criminals, and a swathe of credit unworthy cannot get a credit card- the credit card debt per individual calculates to about $3,000. The real figure is probably in the vicinity of $10,000 per individual considering that many of us have more than one credit card. Some of it may be easy money borrowed at lower interest rates and some of it may be driven by necessary spend. Considering the earned median income is at $35,000, a third of an average Joe’s annual income is supplemented simply as I.O.U.s or will pay tomorrow.

For banks, the end of the free money era will give birth to more scrutiny era, which is a good thing: why should we, small time depositors, pay the price of a run on the bank because it did not scrutinize borrowers thoroughly? Banks’ profits will keep in line with general economic growth trends, shorn of a wistful era of high yields. Lenders from credit card companies to those that finance private equity buyouts will be thoughtful and cautious as they mow the borrower’s capacity with a fine toothcomb. The mystic art of leveraging-speculating with borrowed money-will be less employed.

A recession allied by loss of jobs will test not only the sustainability of our earned income but equally compel each one of us to question the rationale of presently splurging the unknown future income. Thus an intense dose of an economic purge by way of a recession will likely render the same benefits of a digestive purge after a binge of beer and pizza served via plastics-on a plastic plate and paid through your plastic credit card. And probably individuals, banks and companies will start the next cycle more thoughtfully and experientially wise.

For a generation that has been on the “go” since the last fifteen plus years and in its onward march of technological progression and constantly looming terrorist threats, a recession is hardly desirable, both as a matter of speech-because of the power of self-fulfilling prophecy-and as a matter of the substantive discomforts: who wants to work even harder just to get, say a tenth of what used to be easily available? I don’t think our psyches are shaped to crave for work let alone hard work. Even our bodies have evolved only to indulge in the hedonistic pleasures of life. Answer this to yourselves: would you prefer to run five miles in thirty minutes or would you prefer to order pizza, sit in a couch and watch your choice of show on the television for thirty minutes munching Dorritos till the pizza is delivered?

Somewhere sometime the era of free money has to end. Even the most primitive ecosystems experience corrective mechanisms after periods of excessive growths. Aren’t forest fires beneficial to forests? Yes, trees get burnt and die taking down entire ecosystems but a recession won’t kill us but leave us a little less hopeful and force us to work even harder. The fatalistic downside analogies of a forest fire do not match up; the upside analogies do. To be fair I am neither a pessimist nor a sadist who forecasts doom-and-gloom and revel in the misery of the human condition. Nonetheless a sober assessment of the benefits of recession can make us stand aplomb and face a recession with certitude; moreover the ill effects of a recession may not render us as despondent as it is made out to be in our minds and TV talk shows.

What good can be gained out of a bad thing as a recession? First and foremost, a severe recession will not only be a test of our wallet size and wealth status but will test our integrity and moral compass, individually and collectively. If many of us loose our jobs will we behave differently? Will we become more helpful or will we become sympathetic towards someone committing a theft? Will societies start cleaving as the rich hoard leaving the wage monkeys desperate and mutinous? Will the rich start display tough love, asking you and me to serve as their nannies and cab drivers for dollars and cents? What happens matters: when you stare at the depth of abyss and it stares back at you, then, and only then, will you reveal your true character. What is true for individuals will be on display for societies under severe recessionary conditions.

What will happen to us if our incomes were to drop? Our hard work will be asked to testify in different aspects of our lives. The first thing that will go out of our consumptive radars are those goods and services that are income driven opulence: you crimp on spending for an extra pair of shoes or skip buying Armani suit or postpone buying a mega-sized Television as you learn to enjoy with what you have; you order less of pizza and cook more at home; your family invariably ends up gathering on the dinner table and not learn about each other through Facebook or Twitter or SMS messages; you take your family to exercise at the neighboring park rather than to Disney and see obesity levels dropping and self-healthcare replacing dependence on company provided healthcare; and rest of the summer you teach them things at home as you learn new skills yourselves; to go places you will use the most economic transportation be it small cars or public transportation or cycles or a good walk; you meet more people like you, both in your community and elsewhere and you start connecting. We might end up living like a true community and less married to the twenty hour work life of a big corporation.

What all will we learn as a society? Will we learn to experience the toils of sweat and blood to earn money as opposed to riding the chicanery of pump-and-dump? Will we learn how to generate real wealth or wallow in forlorn thoughts about how easily money used to be available once upon a time? Will we work even harder and more efficiently to generate genuine wealth and improvements versus day trading with each passing minute and gaming everyone’s minds as to whether the next tick will be green or red? Will we work to generate tangible material benefits for the society as opposed to creating esoteric and heavily footnoted contracts, play poker games with borrowed money and see it all vaporized in a whisker’s time? Will we learn about the real wealth of our society?

A long recession will likely purge the excesses of free money economics, strip down the mystery of leveraged returns, bring down the individual and collective hubris, slow down our restless minds, relax our overworked selves, awaken our complacent minds, force us to learn different skills and trades, challenge our creativity, exhibit and experience the goodness of fellow humans, and let us learn an invaluable lesson to teach our next generation. Keep a log of your travails: at the end of the recession you could write a book that becomes the best seller.

Goodbye splurging and welcome recession.