Recession and redundancy - disaster or opportunity?

My mate Steven's 26th birthday party was on Saturday night, so my boyfriend and I had the perfect excuse to spend the day - well, the whole weekend, really - wandering round in the glorious sunshine before heading over to Covent Garden where the party was. Despite a spate of redundancies at the City law firm he works for, Steven confided cheerfully that he wasn't worried.

"I've decided to take voluntary redundancy," he confessed over his pint of beer. "There's so many people losing their jobs, I'm not going to sit around and wait to see if I'm next."
"You're doing what?!?" I gasped. "I thought you liked your job?"
"Oh, I do like my job," he answered airily, "but I work such long hours all the time, I haven't had a break for years. So the opportunity's come up, and I've decided to take it. Besides which," he added, grinning, "I get a much bigger payoff this way."
"But, mate," I continued to protest. "Are you sure you know what you're doing?"
"Well, yeah," he said. "I mean, come on, this is an opportunity, innit? I can sit at home, have a rest, do nothing for a year, maybe I'll even travel a bit, then go back to work somewhere else..."

Now that's a response I haven't often heard this recession: "It's an opportunity". Open any newspaper or turn on any TV, and you'll hear a thousand and one doom-and-gloom articles about the failing economy and the ever-increasing queues outside jobcentres up and down the UK. In the past 18 months the BBC news website has featured stories of despair from people who have either been made redundant, or are under threat of being made redundant. People are worried sick, taking on more work, taking pay cuts, working longer hours, being nice to the boss, all in a desperate scramble to hold onto their jobs as tightly as possible, yet here's my mate Steven jumping at the chance to lose his job - hell, he's even asking his firm to let him go.

While the next few weeks will show if Steven actually meant it (or whether he'd simply drunk too much beer), I couldn't help wondering about both points of view. Clearly the media have painted the credit crunch as an unmitigated disaster, the worst financial crisis for a century; but there is a small crowd who feel that the recession has thrown up plenty of opportunity. In Steven's case, he's 26, single and has no domestic or financial commitments. He went straight into practising law after university, so unlike myself, he didn't have the chance to travel or try something else before embarking on a career. It's easy to see how he'd view this recession as a big opportunity for himself.

But it's not just him, though. Some businesses are taking that view as well. Budget supermarkets like Aldi and Lidl in the UK are apparently having a great time, as is any business marketed for "the credit crunch". Foyles Bookstore in London's Charing Cross Road put up posters listing their examples of businesses that had started in recessions:

• Burger King
• Disney
• FedEx
• Microsoft
• CNN
• General Electric
• MTV
• Sports Illustrated
• Hewlett Packard

among others.
While I am not going to be one of those dismissive or unrealistically "optimistic" people who bray that this recession is nothing to worry about, or who belittle the hardship and distress of many going through tough circumstances, I do feel it's probably worth remembering that there are two sides to every story as with everything else.

Now I just have to sit down with a cup of tea and consider what opportunity my own redundancy has given me!