Because everything arrives late in the Philippines, we are only now being told that the recession is about to hit.

Yet if you talk to the middle class, the working class and the thinking class, they'll tell you it's not a delayed arrival, it's been there all along, we just didn't know it.

We've been so used to large-scale unemployment, homelessness, cashlessness, unpaid and unpayable debts that we forgot what a state we are in. We've been a developing economy for more than 30 years, so developing the experts no longer draw up five-year development plans like they used to; now they call them millennium development goals, as in once every 1,000 years.

Still, we're doing very nicely with what we have, what we are.

As the owner of Jollibee observed, men in barong tagalog are eating in his fastfood chain, implying that those well-dressed customers no longer dine in fancy places with a dress code. Parents have moved their kids from private to public schools. And as the price of oil continues to go up, fewer professionals will be buying cars.

Like sweeping the floor and polishing surfaces — cleaning up means nothing more than transferring dust — we are moving our priorities from urgent to less urgent.

It also means transferring the goodies from one pocket to another. Paraphrasing the CEO of PLDT, people are scrimping on a few things (shoes, furniture) but splurging on others (cellphone bills). Bad for the furniture makers, good for the telcos.

The GDP figures are poor but the GNP reading is positive. Consuming and spending are good for an economy in crisis, so maybe the happy people I see dining out in Greenbelt and Edsa Shangri-la Mall are enjoying themselves to postpone their own private recession.