So. A few weeks ago I got an email from the publishers of Micael Dahlén’s upoming book Nextopia, asking me for my comments on the book. Besides being incredibly flattered (Micael is after all Sweden’s first professor in advertising), i’ve also had a bad conscience ever since for not finishing my comments. But I think I’ve approached it all wrong. Doing a huge overhaul is too big of a chunk for a modern restless 29-year old. After all, Micael is writing the book live on his blog, and then my comments should naturally follow that format. Posting my comments here as we go is the way to go of course. We’ll call it The Nextopia Stalker. And it starts here.
I guess it might be fitting to start out by posting some comments on the overall theme of Nextopia, the journey to elsewhen and the joy of next. On my bedside table right now i have a ridiculously tall pile of books. (When am I going to read them all? Soon, of course. I’m going to read them all next). Among them is a Daniel Gilbert bestseller called Stumbling on Happiness which covers a little bit about the psychology of next.
The distinctly human feature of being able to plan ahead is fairly new and located in the frontal lobes of the brain (the brain has evolved back to front over the course of evolution). One example of this is how it is actually a much more complex and fantastic feat to imagine something like the pyramids or a space station than actually building it. This ability to imagine the future is largely what sets us apart mentally from simpler life forms, and has led us to where we are today. Less complex forms of life (say a squirrel) can make immediate, local and personal predictions such as detecting danger or locating food, functions which are located in “older” parts of our brains as well.
So what has this got to do with Nextopia? Well – everything. First off, why are we never content and continue striving for the next thing? Perhaps because we strive for happiness. We spend about 12 percent of our time thinking about the future. That’s a fairly large chunk of our life considering it’s purely a product of your imagination. Even though thinking about the future is a great source of anxiety in our society, it seems we spend more time imagining pleasurable things than disturbing ones. And that could be a source of our drive to always seek the next thing. We rarely produce as pleasurable results in reality as we did in our imaginations, and thus we’re on to the next and more pleasurable dream rather than hanging on to reality.
There are several levels of predicting or nexting. There is the short term and more rudimentary (the immediate, local and personal) level, which I would say is highly relevant to businesses like gambling, porn or drugs; but there is also the medium term (next car, next restaurant, next movie), the long term (next wife, next job, next house) and the XL-term (next life).
While the short term kicks have been taken care of early in history (prostitution, alcohol, drugs), the evolution of production and markets with fairly recent jolts such as the industrial revolution and the even more rescent globalization has enabled us to engage in fairly heavy medium term nexting, sometimes beyond the boundaries of sanity with shopaholic behavior as an example. With an increasingly liberal culture (compared to say Japan) we’re starting to see definite signs of similar behavior in some long term nexting, especially jobs, but also in relationships.
For more heavy nexting in the XL-term, we’ll have to do some more stem cell research or move to India.
{ 0 comments… add one now }