The School of Life

Project In-Between: Stories That Change Everything - part two

Elke Lahousse interviews F.S. Michaels,  author of Monoculture: How One Story Is Changing Everything. She recently won America's 2011 NCTE George Orwell Award, for critical analysis of public discourse.

 

What made you write this book? How long did your research take?

FS: "The seed of this book began about 10 years ago when I was at business school working on my MBA. I was in a Human Resources class, and we were talking about how companies could build profits by putting their people first, and I suddenly realized that putting people first wasn't the point, of course. Building profits was the point, and putting people first was just a means to that end. I asked the professor about that and she said, "That's just the way we have to sell it in order to be heard."  It wasn't seen as legitimate to talk about human dignity, or treating people decently in and of itself. You could only talk about that if you could link it to financial performance. And I started wondering why that was.

By the end of my MBA, I was working on another project on corporate social responsbility and ethics, and what I discovered was that the same kind of thing was happening there. Researchers were telling companies to be ethical because "ethics pays." That's a total reworking of the idea of ethics. I started to wonder how many other ideas had been rerouted to an economic end. I kept trying to figure out what I was seeing and to name it. And the pattern kept getting deeper and deeper. So following my curiosity ended up taking the better part of the next ten years."

 

How did understanding our economic monoculture change your life (the six areas you mention)?

FS: "Good question. I'm still coming to terms with how the economic story takes over our other stories, narrowing our diversity and creating a monoculture. I'm still trying to figure out how to live alongside the monoculture - being in it but not of it, so to speak. But one way it definitely changed my life is that I decided to leave my PhD studies in organizational analysis after five years of work. I had come to a crossroads, because I was told the research I was doing was too broad, covered too many systems. PhDs are very specialized, so to finish the degree, I was going to have to shelve the idea of the monoculture for a few years, or drastically reduce the scope, which I thought destroyed the point of the whole thing. Too, I was looking at how the economic story was changing higher education, and I could see those changes playing out because I was living inside that system, and I didn't think the writing on the wall looked good. (Education, for example, has moved from being thought of as a public good to a private good - a commodity - where students become buyers, schools become sellers, tuition goes up, faculty becomes contract staff, and that all contributes to the rewriting of the purpose of education.)

But that was still a tough decision to make. Understanding the economic story helped me understand what I was going through in trying to make that decision, and it helps me understand what I'm still going through now that the decision has been made. Plus I also look at the world entirely differently because I see so many examples of how the economic story is still spreading - into our communities, our creativity, our relationships, our governments, our physical and spiritual health, our work - and how that's affecting us."

 

2011 was a drastic year for our economy, and many surrounding systems involved. Do you think we're going towards a new narrative/monoculture?

FS: "I think the Occupy movement is a sign of people starting to question some of the more overt things that happen when we adhere to the values that make up the economic story: the gap between rich and poor widens, the poor get shunted to the side of the road to fend for themselves, and getting ahead becomes the ultimate goal. At the same time, I don't think most people know how powerful the economic story is because it's such a natural part of our mental landscape, and it shapes how we think, feel and act. 

The Occupy movement gets criticized (at least in North America) for not having cohesive demands - a top 10 list of what protestors want, what the issues are (you can see a sample of the range of issues at http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/). But that's a fundamental misunderstanding of the bigger picture. Because once you understand the economic story, you can interpret the Occupy movement as people being upset about the changes that are happening in the spheres that they're involved in. So if you're in education, you see what's happening in education, and you worry about it. If you're in health care, you see what's happening in health care, and you worry about it. If you're in the private sector, you see what's happening in corporations like yours, and you worry about it. If you're in the public sector, you see what's happening there, and you worry about it. So people look like they're protesting unrelated things, but these issues are actually very closely related. They're all components of what changes as the economic story spreads into these different systems.)

In terms of the next story, we're always evolving, but evolution tends to only become recognizable over long time periods. Dominant stories in a certain era last maybe a century or two, and we're only about 40 years into the economic story.

That being said, I believe other stories are absolutely possible, and that the seeds of other stories are still in play. But they're buried, and you have to look hard to find them. Mostly you have to understand exactly what it is you're looking for, in the same way that once you understand exactly what the economic story is, you can see it everywhere. That's something I'd like to write about in the future: what those alternate stories are and how they're playing out around us in hidden ways. What all those seeds will grow into as they mature is a huge question. It's hard to see. Imagine looking at a seed and knowing that inside that little thing is a six-foot tomato plant, or an oak tree. You never know. Seeds surprise you."

 

Elke Lahousse is a journalist, currently living in London. She works for Knack Weekend, the leading lifestyle magazine in Belgium. She introduced Project In-Between for The School of Life, read the previous posts here, here, and here, 

Follow F.S. Michaels' blog at: www.fsmichaels.com

Roman Krznaric asks 'Is Social Media Killing the Art of Conversation?'

There is a crisis in the art of conversation, and it's making us hungry. On the one hand, we face a famine of quality conversation in our relationships. The typical British couple spends more time watching television together – on average, 55 minutes a day – than talking to each other. And the most common reason given for divorce in the West is wives complaining that their husbands don't speak or listen to them.

On the other hand, thanks to technology, we are awash with superficial talk. Think of all the staccato texts and Facebook posts sent last year – how many of those words really added depth and meaning to our lives? We're stuffing ourselves with chatter, but ending up starved of the quality conversation that Socrates savoured.

So should 2012 be the year to put ourselves on a digital diet, as several self-help gurus have suggested? Is it time to worry less about inches on our waistline and more about our hours online?

Any tour of the history of conversation should begin in the 18th century. This was the golden age of the London coffee house. Presiding over hundreds of conversation clubs was the imposing figure of Dr Samuel Johnson, generally acknowledged as the greatest talker in British history.

If only. Contrary to reputation, Johnson was one of history's most disastrous conversationalists, and we have barely recovered from his legacy. "None of the desires dictated by vanity is more general, or less blameable, than that of being distinguished for the arts of conversation," he declared in The Rambler on 4 January, 1752.

In doing so, he admitted that his preferred form of talk was showing off, just as it was in the literary salons emerging in France in the same period. The doctor was full of clever quips and epigrams that served to end conversations rather than open them out. The lesson from the 18th century is that we should avoid that superficial game of spouting witty one-liners and name-dropping the latest opera we've seen.

The 19th century gave birth to the era of hidden emotions. A stark divide arose between how men and women expressed themselves. Men came to prize cool rationality and emotional reserve, while women were more likely to share their inner thoughts and feelings – at least with one another – and showed a greater capacity for sympathetic listening. Just think of Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, who was unable to reveal his feelings for Elizabeth Bennet, held back by pride, social convention and emotional reticence – a good recipe for psychological torture.

Victorian marriage guides said it all, advising women not to burden their husbands with personal troubles, while children were encouraged to repress their feelings.

All this emotional starvation gave way, in the 20th century, to the era of intimate conversation, a transformation born of a new culture of self-reflection in the West and spurred on by the invention of psychoanalysis and the self-help industry.

It gradually became acceptable – especially for men – to talk openly about their emotions with friends and family. And following the sexual revolution in the 1960s, couples were starting to discuss the touchy topic of sex, which lay at the root of so many relationship troubles. It all culminated in The Oprah Winfrey Show, where everyone from butch truck drivers to Hollywood celebs publicly unpacked their emotional baggage in a way that would have shocked a Victorian paterfamilias.

Nevertheless, by the end of the 20th century a conversational revolution had occurred, with spouses and families being able to talk with each other in ways unimaginable in the past, mainly because men had become – emotionally speaking – a little more like women.

We've come a long way in the history of conversation, and should make the most of our inheritance by opting for a healthy portion of emotional openness. Hiding behind a mask has become old-fashioned. Being open about our fears and vulnerabilities is a key ingredient for better conversation. Why? Because if you do it, others will too, with the magic result of a human bond.

So what has digital culture brought to the conversational dinner table? Quick-fire and efficient online talk – which is more about exchanging information than emotions – threatens to send the quality of conversation back to the Middle Ages. And if George Orwell were alive today, he'd be the first to warn us off our technological sweet-tooth. Back in the 1940s, he had already noted a sinister development:

"In very many English homes, the radio is literally never turned off, though it is manipulated from time to time so as to make sure that only light music will come out of it. I know people who will keep the radio playing all through a meal and at the same time continue talking just loudly enough for the voices and the music to cancel out. This is done with a definite purpose. The music prevents the conversation from becoming serious or even coherent."

Just imagine what he would have said about TV, Twitter and texting. Orwell would have led the digital diet brigade, urging us to lock our televisions in a cupboard for a month. Or requesting dinner guests to leave mobile phones on silent in the hallway, just as medieval diners used to leave their weapons at the door.

But the digital age has brought welcome guests to the conversational table, too. My three-year-old twins sit down for breakfast in Oxford every Sunday morning and, courtesy of Skype, are joined by their grandparents in Sydney. And only last month, my high-school history teacher found me, 20 years on, through Facebook. We met for a moving conversation.

It's clear that we can't blame all our conversational woes on living in a wired world, nor will we find all the solutions in a digital detox. So, apart from avoiding vanity-driven repartee and being more open about our emotions, how can we make the switch from high-quantity chatter to high-quality conversation?

A good starting place is to cultivate curiosity about strangers, especially those outside our usual social circles. This doesn't mean making polite chat about the weather: rather, it means exchanging thoughts on beliefs and experiences that matter to us, from love to religion, politics to death. We could even invite them to a meal: as W S Gilbert (the other half of Sullivan) said: "It isn't so much what's on the table that matters, as what's on the chairs."

Up for a bigger challenge? Then tackle the empathy deficit in your relationships and make the imaginative leap of looking at the world through the eyes of others. Maybe you haven't fully appreciated the strains of looking after three toddlers all day. The biggest conversational crime we can commit is to assume we already know what others are thinking and feeling.

Ultimately, though, the art of conversation is to treat it as an adventure where two or more minds meet with the prospect of creating something new, whether it happens online or eye to eye. Honour the credo of the historian and philosopher Theodore Zeldin: "A satisfying conversation is one in which you say what you have never said before." Bon appétit.

Roman Krznaric is a faculty member of The School of Life. This article first appeared in the Independent on Sunday and is based on his new book The Wonderbox: Curious Histories of How to Live published by Profile Books. Roman will be giving a series of five talks at The School of Life based on the book, Life Lessons from the Wonderbox starting with The Six Varieties of Love  on January 11.

From The Archive: Making Resolutions by Alain de Botton

We don’t tend to make resolutions about things we completely believe in. Few of us would ever resolve to be appalled by war or disease.  It just comes naturally.  But we do resolve all the time to be kinder or more hardworking, because a sizeable part of us loves being cruel and sitting around.  A resolution always hovers over a grave inner conflict and constitutes a vow by one part of ourselves against another.  Which is why – according to some - we should never be so foolish as to make a resolution.

And yet we need resolutions - even if we don’t actually manage to carry them through or rather, precisely because we rarely manage to do so.  Trying to lead a moral and a good life must mean regularly daring ourselves to be good.  It’s sometimes said that deep down we are all essentially honest, well-meaning and kind.  I’m not too sure: left to our own devices, we have a frightening tendency to be self-indulgent, selfish, narcissistic and lazy.  So we need resolutions for the same reason as we need laws: to keep ourselves in check. 

A resolution is a voluntary abdication of our freedom and immediate gratification in the interests of a higher goal.  As such, it is a symbol of civilization, defined as an institution which regulates our wilder, more destructive desires for the sake of the common wealth and our own flourishing.  Resolutions are minor laws that we pass against our unruly selves.

We might be tempted to mock the public nature of resolutions.  Why resolve things at New Year? Why tell people? Precisely for the same reason that we tend to go in for public marriage: because it can be useful to back up our own resolve with the pressure that stems from the expectation of others.  It is often not bad enough to let ourselves down, so in addition, we need the fear of letting lots of people down to keep us on track.  By being declared in public, a resolution gains confirmation and amplification.  We can use the energy that surrounds the birth of a new year to lend our own inner change some impetus.

Alain de Botton will be kicking off our new year secular sermon series at Conway Hall on 22 January 2012 to coincide with the launch of his new book: 'Religion for Atheists: A non-believer’s guide to the uses of religion' (forthcoming 2 February 2012).

Image: Katrina Wiedner

Elke Lahousse and Project In-between: do we need a new -ism?

Inventing new words, something journalists just love to do, is like a game with different levels of difficulty. Level one is rather simple and silly. This year we saw bromance, helicopter parents, boomerang children, planking and FOMO - fear of missing out - being included in our dictionaries, describing our modern behaviour and absurd hobbies du jour.

On level two, words destined for the longer term were expanding the lexicon, introducing new social classes in society. Soulitarians, the precariat, and knowmads were invented by writers and academics. All contractions of familiar words and forgotten values. All trying to describe the rise of a new working class defined by the new technology and globalisation of the 21st century.

Level three could be the (more unconscious) stage where large cultural, philosophical and economic movements are being named. The umbrella level, where we name the systems and 'isms' that determine our thinking and aesthetics. Minimalism, communism, feminism, capitalism. Today level three seems to be in a state of flux.

When looking back in history, technological innovation has often been the catalyst for new movements and eras. Our shift from a rural to an industrial society, the inventing of steam trains, the introduction of the printing press, radio, or television, all changed people's lives. They were important steps towards the democratisation of knowledge, bringing new ways of communication and changing people's attitudes.

Now we have super fast and interactive internet. When Belgian workers went on a 24 hour strike last week, in protest at pension reforms, a large amount of twentysomethings wrote and shared open letters online, claiming that striking and paralysing national railways for those who wanted to get to work - not the first time this year - was not the smartest thing to do. "Battle of the generations?" asked the media.

Could it be that the global battles, tensions, and bottom up reactions of citizens we see today - The Occupy movement, Arab Spring - are pushing level three profoundly? To use a buzzword, is there a paradigm shift happening? If so, how do we name it? Who's leading the way? Do we need a new -ism to express our needs?

Postmodernism seems to be over, now the V&A museum is hosting a retrospective on the movement. Can we continue to use the word capitalism by adding a bit of post-, meta-, or neo- to its principles?

How did they do it, back in the days of 1789, going from political upheaval to accepting the ideas of the Enlightenment? On a neuroscience website I read that it takes thirty years of research to approve or oppose a new paradigm.

Even Tate Modern, that modern temple of wisdom and perspective, can't seem to answer what our future narrative will be. On the 3rd and 5th level of the museum they have a timeline running, written by illustrator Sara Fanelli, describing the biggest ideas of the past hundred years: symbolism, constructivism, surrealism. But the timeline stops at the year 2000.

Downstairs in the museum shop, meanwhile, the hints of where we might be going are clearer. Slavoj Žižek's book Living in the End Times has a prominent place in the category 'bestsellers'. And a huge banner is announcing John Martin's exhibition Apocalypse at Tate Britain, at bit further down the Thames. The banner reads: "Apocalypse at Tate Britain. Take the boat outside." 

Elke Lahousse is a journalist, currently living in London. She works for Knack Weekend, the leading lifestyle magazine in Belgium. She introduced Project In-Between for The School of Life, read the previous posts here, and here.

The Canadian based organisation Adbusters is organising a competition to come up with a new -ism to capture the 21st century. Adbusters was launched in 1989 as a not-for-profit "... global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age."  They're probably most known for branding the Occupy Wall Street movement by designing posters and creating the new Twitter hash tag #OCCUPYWALLSTREET. More information on the competition (deadline in May) can be found in the latest issue of their magazine, or at www.adbusters.org/noname.

Illustration Sarah Vanbelle www.sarahvanbelle.be

Timeline at Tate Modern by Sara Fanelli www.sarafanelli.com

Dear Bibliotherapist

Dear Bibliotherapist,

After the madness of Christmas coming to an end, I long for calm, peace, tranquility and solitude! Oh, for a month to do nothing but read. That’s not possible, as I work in a hospital, and my services are frequently in demand. However, maybe you can suggest something I can read in snatched moments? Something that’s the antidote to excesses of all kinds?

Dear Frazzled,

If you’re reading in snatched moments, and need something to take you far away from the stresses of spending, overeating and generally overegging all kinds of puddings, “The Call of The Wild” by Jack London is your antidote. Published in 1903, it is the compelling tale of a dog named Buck, who is kidnapped from his comfortable home in the Santa Clara Valley in California, to pull sleds for gold diggers. Buck epitomises a morality of noble suffering, loyalty to the right man, and the ability to obey his instincts, which always turn out to be true. His life is frequently harsh, as he escapes death by falling through thin ice while attached to a sled, avoids the treachery of men and fellow creatures, and eventually becomes a legendary ghost dog. He is passionately devoted to his final master, but the Wild itself pulls him away. You may find yourself sneaking off for a quick read more frequently than you desired.

In contrast to this romantic and very masculine tale of canine integrity, Nan Shepherd’s “The Living Mountain” (1977) is a meandering diversion of a tale that aims to help you to see the world “as the world sees itself”. Shepherd frequently gives you an eagle-eye view at the same time as describing the view from the snail beneath your feet and the hair on the back of your neck, so that your understanding of this place, the Cairngorm Mountain, is multi-faceted and omnipresent. She feels the mountain with all of her senses, describing the incredible ability of the hand to experience textures, temperatures and touch, and she mourns the loss of this daily exploration of the world with our bodies as much as our minds. Her major plea in this book is for us to live “all the way through”. You will find yourself dreaming of sleeping on a juniper bush, to be woken by a robin’s claw. Hovering over yourself, one part of you will be in a mountain in Scotland, while your body fulfils its functions at your workplace.

After this you may feel the need to lose yourself in a longer book, enjoying the slow pace of a quest through the himalayas, for both the elusive snow leopard of the title and for enlightenment. “The Snow Leopard” by Peter Matthieson describes an expedition with the famous field biologist Georges Schalle to North Nepal to find the mystical creature, during which the author ponders the philosophies that he discovers there, both Buddhist and more ancient Himalayan beliefs. Matthieson’s reflections are perfectly balanced by his everyday concerns about avalanches and altitude sickness. Written in 1978, it describes a world that is way beyond smart phones and satellites, and it will take you far from your own everyday concerns into a mystical country which, we hope, might still exist.

Ella Berthoud is a bibliotherapist at The School of Life.  To find out more about the service click here.

Ben Irvine on Roko Belic's Film 'Happy'

Charm works wonders; which is why persuasion is often sweetened with entertainment. Examples of this can readily be found in theatre, literature, cinema, song, comedy, political broadcasting, and, of course, advertising. The film Happy belongs in this broad tradition, but its cast of characters is anything but stereotypical, especially when compared to onscreen protagonists today. Instead of the usual figures of “inspiration” – pouting actors, fawning politicians, grinning goons selling car insurance – Happy introduces us to pensioners from Okinawa, Danish co-housing inhabitants, Namibian Bushmen, a disfigured former debutante from America, a surfer from Brazil, an Indian rickshaw driver, an amateur crab fisherman from Louisiana, and some unusually down-to-earth academics.

The film enlists all these unglamorous people in order to explain where happiness comes from. Strikingly, their most potent tool for the task is their most natural one – their smiles: genuine, warm, deep, long, enticing smiles. In a culture where vox-pops keep popping up all over the place, like those whack-a-moles in the fairground game, it’s unusual to see such lingering earnestness. It makes you pay very close attention.

In doing so, you are reminded of some plain, simple truths, which many of us had forgotten amid the distracting sensory bombardment of modern life: enduring happiness comes from such staples as supportive families, friendly communities, calm mindfulness, regular exercise, enjoying food in company, helping others, and savouring the beauty of the natural world. All of which – note – are relatively inexpensive, if not cost-free.

Note, also, that we’re not usually reminded of any of this. The psychology of human admiration is somewhat trigger-happy, a fact which consumerism exploits, day in day out, in persuading us to part with our money. Typically, a happy-looking person is paraded before our captivated eyes, and we instinctively resolve to emulate whatever they are doing at the time. Driving a big car. Carrying a designer handbag. Drinking an expensive bottle of wine. Much of human behaviour is associative, and, unless we are given good reason to do otherwise, we’ll keep pressing levers when we’re promised rewards. The problem is, many of these “rewards” not only fail to make us happy, they actually make us unhappy, through encouraging futile one-upmanship rather than sociability.

Watching Happy gives us reason to pause. The experience is like waking up from a caffeine-fuelled nightmare – one in which you were half-conscious, albeit manically suggestible. Real happiness, we rediscover, is delightfully normal; nothing we didn’t know about already, deep-down; it is a nostalgic feeling, which we can amplify, any time we like, into real and present pleasures. We are like the character ‘Winston’ in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, inundated by phoney promises of happiness, a ‘newspeak’ version which is in fact a big lie; yet, unlike him, we can choose to embrace oldspeak happiness, the real thing, instead.

In reminding us of this, director Roko Belic’s Happy is a hugely inspiring film. We must keep that mood moving.

Ben Irvine is editor of the 'Journal of Modern Wisdom' (www.modernwisdom.co.uk) and 'Cycle Lifestyle' magazine (www.cyclelifestyle.co.uk).  To find out more about the film visit www.thehappymovie.com 

John-Paul Flintoff on New Year's Resolutions

Are you thinking of making a new year's resolution? If so, why not consider making a late-December resolution instead?

The only good reason for waiting till the beginning of January is to make a resolution that is specific to January: such as (perhaps) resolving to eat and drink more modestly after a Christmas of excess. If your resolution is not specific to January, why wait?

When it comes to the really big issues facing us, there can be no time like the present to do what is most important to us.

That's partly because we never know how long we have got. In the months before he died, last week, Christopher Hitchens wrote and stated frequently that the inevitability of death focuses the mind on what is important. (Steve Jobs, who died not long before him, did the same.) Buddhists teach us to consider that every day may be our last, and to base our conduct on that insight – while also bearing in mind the contradictory idea that we may live for quite a long time. If we hold both those ideas in mind at once, we learn to plan for the long term, which is important, but also to focus on what we can do now.

Big issues are too big to fix all at once. The only way to tackle them is to break them down into small steps. Every great achievement of the past was completed that way: building Stonehenge, painting the Mona Lisa, landing on the moon.

So: don't wait till January but start working on those small steps at once. Because if you can't manage a small step in the next day or so, what makes you think you ever will?

John-Paul Flintoff is a faculty member of The School of Life and will be teaching our How to Make a Difference class on Saturday 14^th January 2012, for more information and to book tickets please click here.

Loretta Breuning on Why Goals Don't Bring Satisfaction

Reaching a goal triggers dopamine. That feels great, but the spurt soon ends. Then you become who you were before the spurt. If you’re not comfortable with that, you can get caught up in endless efforts to stimulate more dopamine with more goal-seeking. 

We're uncomfortable with dopamine dips for good reason, of course. Unhappy chemicals command your brain’s attention the moment happy chemicals droop. Things may seem awful all of a sudden, even if they’re not. 

Unhappy chemicals evolved to alert you to survival threats. They feel bad because that gets your attention. Sometimes we can relieve unhappy chemicals by fixing the underlying problem, like eating when you’re hungry or sleeping when you’re tired. But some unhappy chemicals will always be there to remind you that life is finite and you’re not the boss of the world.

You can mask your unhappy chemicals by doing things that triggered your happy chemicals in the past. But that will only work for a short time. Happy chemicals did not evolve to surge all the time. Their job is to get your attention when something promotes your survival. They turn off soon after they turn on so they’re ready to get your attention to the next good thing. 

If you haven’t learned to live with your unhappy chemicals, you might get into the habit of scrambling for another dopamine burst in any way possible. You seek the next promotion or the next party or the next donut or the next mountain or the next confrontation, depending on how your brain got wired. Your create frustration, which means more unhappy chemicals and a more frantic quest to trigger happy chemicals.

An recent monkey study makes the ups and downs of dopamine amazingly clear.  Researchers trained a group of monkeys to do a small task in exchange for a spinach leaf. Then the experimenters rewarded the monkeys with squirts of juice instead of spinach.  Juice is a lot more rewarding than spinach because it has much higher energy value. The animals’ dopamine soared. Dopamine is the brain’s way of saying, “this reeeeally meets your survival needs.”

Then something curious happened. The monkeys’ dopamine fell over time. They continued getting the juice reward for the task each day, but their brains stop reacting to it. This shows that dopamine is the brain’s reaction to new information about new rewards. Once the juice was part of the routine, no effort was needed to get it and no dopamine was needed to record the survival lesson.

This experiment has a dramatic finale. The experimenters stopped the juice and switched back to spinach. The monkeys responded to the spinach with fits of rage. They had come to expect the juice. They were clearly unhappy when they didn’t get it, but it didn’t make them happy when they got it. 

This is the survival mechanism we’ve inherited. Old rewards don’t make us happy because the brain soon habituates to them. It takes what you have for granted and focuses its attention on new rewards. If you could get bigger and better rewards in every moment, you would never have to experience the core unhappiness of being a mortal human being. But that desperate seeking causes unhappiness of its own.

This unhappiness is usually blamed on “our society” because people don’t understand how they are creating it in their own brain. You are free to step off the “hedonic treadmill” whenever you choose. You can do it in one instant, just by accepting your unhappy chemicals instead of rushing to mask them with happy chemicals. You will find that your unhappy chemicals are not nearly as terrible as the habit of running from them. 

Instead of getting frustrated with your neurochemical ups and downs, you can thank your brain for trying to promote your survival. This brain we’ve inherited from earlier mammals has successfully promoted survival for two hundred million years.

A hungry lion spurts dopamine when it spots prey. A thirsty elephant releases dopamine when it finds water. A monkey’s dopamine flows when he nears a juicy fig after climbing a high tree. Dopamine kept our ancestors going on long efforts, whether stalking game or storing grain for winter. Dopamine tells your body to release energy reserves because the goal is near. 

Today, dopamine fuels a student through long years of medical school. It fuels an athlete through long hours of training. Dopamine plays a central role in our survival. But the effort to manipulate your brain into giving you constant highs is not really in your own survival interest. You are better off accepting the ups and downs that humans have been heir to for millions of years.

Loretta Breuning writes for Phychology Today her new book ‘Meet Your Happy Chemicals’ will be available in early 2012. MeetYourHappyChemicals.com

 

Elke Lahousse and Project In-Between On Visual Storytelling

In-between journalism, art, and a bit of science, lies an emerging new field called data visualisation.

Do you know what Marshall McLuhan in 1964 really meant when he said "the medium is the message"? His one-liner has become an overused and often misquoted cliché.

A few months ago, The Guardian launched the philosophical Big Ideas Podcast on their website. They kicked off the first edition by discussing McLuhan’s most famous line, with some help from writer and McLuhan’s biographer Douglas Coupland.

Although "the medium is the message" line might be overused, it has never made more sense than in today's hyper-connected world of sharing, tweeting, streaming, smart phones, public voting, Wikileaks, satellites and new technology.

A quick refresher: McLuhan used 'medium' in a broad sense. Every tool that people create is a medium. The wheel, a gps, a hammer, a pen, a guitar, a light bulb, a newspaper, you get it. We shape tools, they shape us.

The Canadian media theorist argued that a medium affects society, not only by the content delivered over the medium (light, information, transportation, music), but also by the characteristics of the medium itself. The effects it has on our human sensorium. Watching a crime report on television may be less about the individual news story itself or the content, and more about the change in public attitude towards crime.

To make his point clear, McLuhan frequently punned on the word "message" changing it to "mess age", "mass age", and "massage", as in the title of his book "The Medium is the Massage" published in 1967. New tools massage our brain. Wired magazine named McLuhan the real patron saint of the digital revolution, being decades ahead of his time.

Although some theorists have attacked McLuhan's broad definition of 'medium' for being too simplistic, McLuhan understood that the most powerful tools of media are those that help convey ideas, like language.

Media and society have come a long way since Gutenberg introduced the printing press in the 15th century, helping spread the ideas of the Renaissance. Very recently, journalism discovered a new tool to transport and explain ideas and complex topics. It's called data visualisation. Synonyms are info graphics, or information design. It's not about simple pie charts, but about using illustration to say more than a thousand words.

You can read a pile of reports about the Antarctic meltdown, or you can simply look at this map Condé Nast Traveller published, made by the renowned John Grimwade.

You can read a dozen books about how Palestine has shrunk since 1917, or you can look at the diagram that Good magazine made.

If you master some Italian, then the work of art director Francesco Franchi, presented in the monthly magazine Il - Intelligence in Lifestyle, is simply brilliant.

In the Monocle shops you can buy posters that visualise the perfect airplane or train station of the future.

The blog Paris versus New York City shows that information visualisation can also be fun and lighthearted.

Every 24 hours, Fast Company sends out an info-graphic of the day. Last week it explained how drunk you can get at your office Xmas party.

Visualising a message is a powerful aid to human thinking. Show it and you’ll remember it. Just as film has many genres, info-graphics come in different shapes and forms. Combining research, software, emotions and aesthetics, data visualisation rapidly became a field and profession on its own. Way past the point of just using dots, curves and lines.

The 'infobesitas' unleashed at the turn of 21st century democratised information visualisation. Never has there been more data available then now. "The 19th century was about reduction, breaking nature down into the simplest possible elements and defining rules on how these elements interact", which is written in the foreword of Visual Complexity: Mapping patterns of information. "Today, interest lies in understanding phenomena of complexity (chaos theory, climate change), which is reflected in the kinds of visualisations we find appealing."

Manuel Lima, the man behind the book and website visualcomplexity.com, claims that data visualisation is well on its way to becoming as important to 21st century as photography and film were to the 20th century.

"What we are seeing is the ability to have economies form around data - and that to me is the big change at a societal and even macroeconomic level", says Craig Mundie, head of research and strategy at Microsoft. When you glance at The Map of the Future, made by Density Design for the Italian Wired, you get what he means. These are visuals worth putting on our computer desktop and hanging on our walls.

It is not only print media that is experimenting with information visualisation, but it is also tv and the internet. Nederland van boven is a new program on Dutch television, launched last week. From up in the sky, with helicopters and balloons, data journalists look at rhythms and patterns that define daily life in the Netherlands. There are the famous RSA Animate videos, explaining theories about education, choice, the brain.  The New York Times use infographics in their newspaper, and interactive versions online.

Art schools and universities are setting up new courses and workshops to learn this profession. Visual journalism is a new way of telling stories and requires cross disciplinary skills. Tashen and Gestalten are publishing books about the trend, Information Graphics is due out in January 2012, Gestalten recently published Visual Storytelling. The blog Information graphics news bundles all the curiosities that happen in this field.

You get the message, and the medium. Graphic journalists, information designers, whatever you call them, they master a skill to help us prioritise and convey structure in a world of abundance and change. Who said print is dead? Praise to the new rock stars!

Elke Lahousse is a journalist, currently living in London. She works for Knack Weekend, the leading lifestyle magazine in Belgium. She introduced Project In-Between for The School of Life, read the previous post here.

Illustration John Grimwade  www.johngrimwade.com

llustration Francesco Franchi www.francescofranchi.com

 

 

We All Need Words on Why Jargon Isn't The Problem And 'Plain English' Isn't The Answer

Every year the Plain English Campaign gives out gobbledegook awards to the worst examples of incomprehensible writing at work. But most writing problems in an organisation can’t be solved with a Plain English crystal mark.

About this time every year the Plain English Campaign has its gobbledegook awards. It goes roughly like this: they pick some prize pieces of incomprehensible twaddle, which fill some easy column inches in a few newspapers. We roll our eyes at all the rubbish jargon and business clichés we use at work nowadays and then we move on.

It’s good PR for the Plain English Campaign and, in a small way, it highlights how much nonsense people write in the name of work. What it doesn’t explain is who the main culprits are, why they do it and the root causes of it.

One reason why we never get to the bottom of why there’s so much incomprehensible writing at work is because we too easily dismiss it with one all-conquering word: jargon. But most of the words we label as jargon, such as the Latin or Greek medical terms doctors use, are harmless, as long as they make sense to the people who need to use and understand them.

No, jargon is relatively easy to spring clean. The problem is woolly thinking – when the words hide that there’s nothing to say. And that’s where the Plain English Campaign falls short. Writing can get a sparkly crystal mark and it can do it without saying very much at all.

You can spot writing that’s running on empty thinking as soon as words like ‘experience’, ‘solutions’ and ‘environments’ crop up. They’re not made-up words or jargon, exactly. They’re empty vessels that apply to everything, but say nothing. Going to Westfield is an experience, not shopping. A new phone is an experience, not a way to call your friends (the word ‘device’ probably gets flung in for good measure). It’s a one-size-fits-all strategy, what we call brand slop, and you find it in middle management at most big organisations.

Once you realise brand slop uses essentially empty words, it’s not much of a leap to notice that most of these departments operate on a meta level, creating strategies, PowerPoint presentations and charts that don’t have any reason to exist. Try translating brand slop into simpler words (or ‘Plain English’) and you soon find that you can’t. Or if you can, you find that it says nothing, just more simply.

Most of us come across brand slop at work. A while ago we met a friend of ours at his office. He’s a social worker and his job involves making lots of difficult decisions about whether a child would be better off with their parents or in care. As you’d imagine, it’s stressful and emotionally draining. Meanwhile, his well-meaning managers decided that the best way to help him would be to give him some positive words, or ‘values’, of encouragement. And what had they come up with? ‘Think’ and ‘Inspire’. Plastered over the screensaver of every computer screen ‘think’ and ‘inspire’ were spinning around in 3D. Some help.

Brand values are one of the biggest examples of brand slop. They’re either always open to interpretation so everyone can claim they’re ‘living the values’ (yes, these phrases exist too) by being ‘warm’ and ‘friendly’ and whatever. Or, as someone in the brand team of a big mobile network once explained to us, it’s nigh on impossible to take these mushy words out of PowerPoint presentations and make them work in real life. When someone from a call centre asked him ‘how exactly can I be more “bold” on the phone when I’m talking to a customer?’ there wasn’t an easy answer. Again, it’s easy to test this sort of brand slop. Let’s say your company’s values are ‘open, honest and passionate’. Now ask the opposite. Who’d want a business that’s closed, dishonest and indifferent?

Values are broad and are usually thrashed out internally to get buy-in. But as a result they’ve become a kind of pep talk for organisations to convince and reassure themselves that la-la-la everything’s ok really, without tackling any of their ingrained problems. Actually, ‘the opposite test’ is a good way to reveal what an organisation’s problems really are. We once worked with a company that had ‘adventurous’ as one of its values. We soon found out that they’d come up with this because their people were timid and they wanted them to take more risks. It didn’t work. Despite the words on all the walls, Ranulph Fiennes wouldn’t have fitted in very well there.

So where did all this brand slop come from? You’ll see its roots in the theories of management books, journals and consultancies, and the sort of things business students learn on MBAs. A lot of the original theory and research is sound enough. Pick up an old book by a management guru like Peter Drucker and it’s all pretty no-nonsense. Or read a bestseller by Jim Collins and you’ll find yourself nodding along.

The problems happen somewhere after that. Because what brand slop does is take management theory and tries to fit it into a neat model everywhere else, even when that doesn’t work.

You simply can’t sum up a brand – the irrational bit about how people feel about one company over another – by squishing it into a triangle, or wrapping it up in a list of (often the same) words plucked from a thesaurus.

It’s not just marketing and branding, it’s the same story in every management department. Once upon a time Human Resources was called Personnel and its main role was to do the practical things that companies need for its people, from hiring and firing to all the things in between. But in the seventies management books started talking about people as if they were numbers. Soon ‘human capital theory’ and ‘human asset accounting’ were all the rage. By the time the Harvard Business School introduced Human Resources to its MBA at the beginning of the eighties, there was no turning back and no one questioned the idea that ‘people are your greatest asset’. Well, not until the book ‘Managing Brand Equity’ came out a decade later and then brands were crowned the latest, greatest asset.

The idea of turning brands and people into ‘assets’ reveals a lot about the underlying problem with brand slop. It’s not that it isn’t quite true, it’s that you can’t treat things like brands and people in the same way as capital. Numbers can be moved around on Excel sheet, but in the real world people’s skills and talents can’t.

In the end most big companies are good at being just that: big. Using their muscle to cut costs in production and distribution. And business books or MBAs can help with that. You can learn how to make logistics (or the supply chain as the MBA-ers call it) more efficient from a book. The same goes for anything to do with distributing products and financially restructuring a business. But what do all those things have in common? They’re all about operations: the nuts and bolts of running a company. And, despite what all the strategic presentations tell you, most big companies still get their profits from these sort of operational tweaks. Whether that’s by finding more places to sell things, making more of them, or by or cleverly restructuring the way they’re made or work.

So the process stuff is easy to solve. Creativity, innovation and making people feel good about a brand aren’t. This is when big organisations turn to brand slop. Except it never works. All the good ideas and innovation usually come from copying smaller, gutsier start-ups or by buying them and, more often than not, messing them up with layers of process and bureaucracy. Just read What happens after Yahoo acquires you to get a first-hand account of what goes on behind the scenes when a smaller start-up is taken over and infected by brand slop.

But what about Apple, the consultant’s favourite anecdotal branding success? Funnily enough, if you read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, one of the most striking things is how little time Jobs had for PowerPoint, idea-sucking research, and elaborate strategies. You could argue that one of the reasons Apple are so successful is that they manage their supply chain well and they’ve cut out the brand slop altogether.

It’s not a bad thing to write down what your brand is or to improve how your company works. The problem comes when you over-simplify difficult things and use empty language to do it. It doesn’t add anything or help you run your business better. And if all the money you’re spending on marketing, management, and HR strategies isn’t doing anything, what’s the brand slop actually there for?

 We All Need Words run regular writing workshops at The School of Life.  Visit www.weallneedwords.com