Hugh Macleod writes about the rise of an "Antidote Economy" in response to the "*brave* new world of stimulus oversupply…. It’s an increasingly huge cultural phenomenon, simply because we need more and more antidotes to balance out our increasingly expensive yet frazzled quality of life."

I can only hope. What are some examples?

Bed & breakfast weekends in Vermont, Zen meditation retreats in New Mexico, farmer’s markets, specialist coffee and tea shops, Shaker furniture, yoga classed, art galleries in Laguna Beach, artisanal pickles, hand made scented candles, and of course, Brooklyn. 

Sounds great. Is there a downside?

To make a living in The Antidote Economy, you also need a fairly large, affluent chunk of the population to still remain on the outside looking in. You need enough stressed out, overprogrammed yuppy-scumbag types in boring, 80-hour-week office jobs that they hate, to ensure that there’s enough disposable income swishing around to fund your alternative, post-capitalist lifestyle experiment.

Oh.

Brooklyn is only possible because Manhattan is never very far away. Authentic living needs lots of fake people in order to pay for it.

Well, it's still good news for my book sales.

Update. Okay, so I think I get where the piece is coming from: it's a bit like the "there's no longer any such thing as offline any more because even when you're walking on the beach you're thinking about what Instagram filter would rock the view" argument. The more serious point is that the Antidote Economy is fed by profitable discontent: just as cars need long-dead dinosaurs, so too do purveyors of authenticity need people to spend 80-hour weeks to make themselves, well-heeled customers.