The Way We Live Now: Free! The rich are selling off their possessions and "going minimalist." We've stopped building any new houses. Everyone take to the land! Nude!

The Wall Street Journal declares the Gilded Era "Gone," which would seem more meaningful if it was in the context of some solemn, ponderous front page screed on the folly of late Twentieth-Century capitalism, rather than a story about rich people in Florida auctioning off their wildebeest heads and Ferraris so they can go buy a cabin in the mountains.

But that's significant too! Who are you kidding? Anything that would make a rich retiree in Vero Beach wake up one morning, smack himself in the head, and say, "We don't need all this stuff any more" is bound to be a good, meaningful thing. Having sold off all their accumulated crap for pennies on the dollar, the formerly rich retreat to the countryside. Where they will probably live in a prefab home or some sort of trailer, since new home construction just hit an all time low.

Luckily there are rotting home carcasses by the thousands available all across America! Back to nature—or at least back to suburbia—is the comforting wave of the future, for those still rich enough to afford it. For the poor, it's nudity and camping. Which is good, because NUDITY PAYS. Economic revival is as close as woodland sex orgies with former wealthy Floridians!
[Pic via]