“Misery is a stronger emotion than happiness, and catastrophes punctured their minds and reshaped their sense of their lives in a way that ordinary contentment did not.” So writes Larissa MacFarquhar regarding a couple who adopted twenty children, ending up with twenty-two kids total (before the deaths, that is).
Personally, my planned route to motherhood is adoption, but twenty seems excessive. Regardless, I wonder: Is it true? Is pain more potent than joy? Is it really so easy to disregard “ordinary contentment” and focus on the half-empty glass?
My own experience yields a complex answer. When I’m unhappy, it’s all I can think about. On the other hand, when I’m happy I can only vaguely conceive of being miserable. During periods of cheer and energy, it’s easy to remember that the profound sadness happened once. Sure, I can pull up the words to describe the feeling — typical cliches: numb, exhausted, wallowing in despair, etc. However, knowing what to say about depression is different from being mired in it.
Lemminkäinen’s Mother by Akseli Gallen-Kallela, 1897; via Adam Ansar.
MacFarquhar’s article about the astonishingly large family addresses grief, a type of misery with which I’m less familiar. I’ve known a few people who died — one grandmother, one grandfather, and two grade-school classmates’ mothers. Maybe when someone integral to your daily happiness dies, it shatters everything quickly the way depression shatters everything in slow-motion.
Unhappiness can inspire a person to obscure their emotions, to pile distractions on top. For example, in an interview on The Billfold, author Sarah Hepola told Ester Bloom, “Booze is a pain management system, and when you remove the anesthesia, you really see the source of your misery.” It’s underneath a bunch of mood-moderation junk.
I wouldn’t say that unhappiness is “stronger” than its counterpart. But it’s plausible that bad feelings trump good ones when both are theoretically present. That makes evolutionary sense, right? You might have to take action based on pain, so it needs to be top-of-mind. On the other hand, contentment frees you to think about other things.
News-media analyst Ken Doctor wrote, “The web may have opened unbelievable frontiers of human thought and interaction, but it’s driven by the same business principles as all other enterprise.” Basically, the market is always the market. Self-interest is a perpetual motivator and supply-demand dynamics continue to exist.
The internet changes a lot, but it doesn’t change the fundamentals of economics. It changes the cost (or lack thereof) of some specific things, like distributing information, but it doesn’t change basic human behavior. It’s kind of ludicrous that anyone might expect it to.
So here’s the point, which has been made before: Everything we don’t like about the implications of technology boils down to something we don’t like about the way humans organize ourselves. Because — to risk repetition — technology doesn’t change humanity; it simply enables us to express our persistent nature in new/different/tweaked ways.
For example, as Adam Elkus wrote on Slate, “Algorithms are impersonal, biased, emotionless, and opaque because bureaucracy and power are impersonal, emotionless, and opaque and often characterized by bias, groupthink, and automatic obedience to procedure.” An algorithm like the one that defines Facebook’s Newsfeed didn’t spring into being independent of people’s choices; it was constructed and enacted based on such choices.
Most consumers don’t know, think, or care about the value judgments being made by the engineers and programmers who design the functionality of apps, phones, thermostats, cars, etc. As long as a product gives us something pleasurable or useful, we brush aside collateral concerns. (Apathy toward data collection is a great example of this.)
Industries respond to what people — and aggregates of people — actually care about, which is expressed via money. As Adam Gopnik wrote in The New Yorker, “Markets are designed to make their own rationality. Where people put their cash reflects what they think and desire.”
Society is unjust because people are unjust, individually and collectively. We often don’t truly care about the things we claim are crucial, or the principles we tout as cherished values. (God save reporters’ salaries.) This is reflected in how humans make and use technology, just as it’s reflected in every other human endeavour. Susie Cagle’s series “The Crooked Valley” illustrates this (literally) very well.
Many marketers don’t consider how normal human beings will interact with their advertisements. This dilemma spans the profession, evident in the work of creative directors, designers, copywriters, account managers, etc. People-Optimized Marketing is a rubric for considering how marketers’ output will perform, based on simple principles.
Effective advertisements make the viewer think, feel, and act. In order for those reactions to be provoked, the visual design must be clear and interesting.
Curiosity gaps coax viewers into thinking. Ads should give the viewer just enough information to prompt them to finish the story, drawing connections in their own mind. Guide the viewer toward a particular narrative without spelling it out entirely.
How do good ads make people feel?
Emotional responses are simple. For the most part, people care about other people, preferably specific people with faces and personalities. Ads can also use symbols and connotations to evoke particular moods, like this ad that shows buildings about to domino into catastrophe:
Most ads won’t get the viewer to make a purchase right away. Rather, good ads give people what they need to act later. The product or service is identified, the brand is clear, and ideally the product is positively differentiated from what the competition offers. Triggers are another important consideration, as discussed in Jonah Berger’s study of virality, Contagious.
What makes an ad well-designed?
Design is more subjective than the other categories. In general, prioritize clarity and simplicity. Viewers need to be able to read the caption (if there is one) and identify the branding. I’ve written about this extensively when it comes to billboards. If you can make the design interesting or beautiful, that’s icing on the cake! Remember, cake needs frosting to be delicious.
Obviously not. People-Optimized Marketing is more about attitude than specific mandates. That said, ads that neglect to make viewers think, feel, and act are missing the opportunity to really engage viewers.
Click here to see all my posts about People-Optimized Marketing.
I could have called this post, “Why I’m Bearish On Bitcoin”. The draft has been in my notes for a long time. I might as well see if anyone will bother to flesh out the idea, or disagree with me — either reaction is welcome! Digital currencies are on my mind today because I had lunch with my friend Eva Gantz, who is the community manager at Stellar. She is, coincidentally, stellar! Anyway…
Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin will fail because of the feature for which they are most lauded: theoretically, no trust required. Veteran journalist Felix Salmon has noted this flaw, as has Sidney Sida Zhang. Cryptocurrencies don’t just incorporate anonymity and lack of trust — they depend on it. Unfortunately for the future of techno-libertarian money, trust is what makes human systems work.
I struggle with this in my personal life. I like to be in control, but I have to outsource what I don’t know how to do, or don’t have time to do. For example, someone else grows the food that I eat. Someone else wrote the code for my website. Someone else takes care of plumbing infrastructure. I have to trust all those people to do their jobs. To a certain extent I can verify them, through consumer and political procedures, through tracking journalism, but eventually it comes down to trust. Trust is essential societal grease.
That’s my entire hypothesis, pretty much. Here’s some interesting cryptocurrency reading (in addition to the articles I linked above by Salmon and Zhang):
I emailed Martin Weigert about this a while ago, and he told me, “I have not worried so much about trust when it comes to Bitcoin. But probably that is because I have only bought like a half Bitcoin so far, so there was always the acceptance of a potential total loss.” Then he asked if my qualms were about Bitcoin specifically or the whole technological basis of it. The following is my response:
From what I’ve read, the base technology is pretty sound. People are very excited about the blockchain. The concern is re: wallets and banks. Inevitably you have to trust a third party to “take care of” your Bitcoins, and sometimes that doesn’t go well, when banks are hacked or abscond with the funds. So the third party must be trustworthy. There have to be checks and balances, leading to centralized authorities, which is what Bitcoin enthusiasts wanted to circumvent.
Here’s something I’ve been told about depression, both personally and generally: “It’s not your fault.” This sentiment is usually extended to any kind of mental illness. From one perspective, it’s true. We are all products — or rather victims — of brain chemistry and circumstance. No one gets to choose their genetics or how they’re treated by other people.
You gotta roll with the punches. Unfortunately, some of us are bad at rolling. Just because. We didn’t decide to default to stupid coping methods, and most of us can’t change our patterns without help. That’s normal and okay, positivity, blah blah blah, etc. The availability of help is crucial. Without health insurance, I would be sleeping on the streets, or dead, which is a cliche so I’m not sure how to state it with enough impact.
As a mentally ill person, I know the experience of suffering because your mind is beyond your control. (I’m tempted to say “formerly mentally ill”, because of ~stigma~, but it’s not something that goes away when the pills are working.) And yet… I have also human agency. To some degree my emotional experience is my fault, at least according to common ideas about how society works.
Author Alexandra Erin noted on Twitter, “So many systems that make up whatever you want to call ‘civilization’ depend on the participants abiding by certain minimal expectations.” It’s hard to blunder into abiding by such expectations, especially en masse — we do it on purpose, and we’re proud of that. Our species is smitten with the semblance of free will. I feel like I make choices.
“You’re born with particular DNA programming, which determines how you perceive and process outside stimuli, thus shaping your progress as a person, as a human psycho-physiological entity. Nature is what determines your reaction to nurture, and you don’t have any control over either. They both affect you, certainly, but not in a way that you can manipulate independently of who you already are… it gets circular. [Bold added.]
And yet we think that we have the power to decide things without reference to our formative contexts. Regardless of my philosophical position, my brain is convinced that it is reasonable. Accordingly, society is built on the idea of responsibility for one’s actions. I’m not saying that it shouldn’t be! As far as I can tell there’s no alternative. But how interesting, that the entire system of civilization is constructed around a logical fallacy.”
On the one hand, this is sort of freeing. “I’m not responsible for being useless and sad all the time!” On the other hand, if nothing is your fault, then you also don’t have any choices.
Battered spouses are often told that they didn’t choose to stay with their abusers after the first incidence of violence (whether emotional or physical). Victims are counselled not to blame themselves. Safety expert Gavin de Becker finds this rhetoric harmful, as he explains in The Gift of Fear. Most advocates contend that abusers forcibly shape reality for their targets, until escape options become invisible. In his book, de Becker argues that this attitude is problematic. If it’s not a choice to stay, then it can’t be a choice to leave. He suggests that empowering abuse survivors requires encouraging accountability for a person’s own abuse. That’s very tricky to do in a non-toxic way.
Are you responsible for your history? Which events and experiences can be traced to your decisions, and which can’t?
“It says you are powerless, that your destiny is entirely determined by the luck of the draw, that the only chance you have of winning the game lies in following the rules, and accepting the cards as they come. Who wants to grow up in that kind of universe?”
Really, that’s the only universe we can grow up in. My friend Adam Brinklow commented on Facebook, “I assumed the real lesson [of Candy Land] was to cheat. Cheating being the only means of affecting the outcome.” I wish that cheating were more than a predictable reaction to stimuli… exactly like all other actions.
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