Category Archives: Consumer Psychology

Why Hate is Trending Up

There seems to be a lot of hate in the world lately. But hate is a hard thing to quantify. There are, however, a couple places that may put some hard numbers behind my hunch.

Google’s NGram viewer tracks the frequency of the appearance of a word through published books from 2022 all the way back to 1800. According to NGram, the usage of “hate” has skyrocketed, beginning in the mid 1980s. In 2022, the last year you can search for, the frequency of usage of “hate” was 3 times higher than it historically was.

NGram also allows you to search separately for usage in American English and British English. You’ll either be happy or dismayed to learn that hate knows no boundaries. The British hate almost as much as Americans. They had the same steep incline over the past 4 decades. However, Americans still have an edge on usage, with a frequency that is about 40% higher than those speaking the Queen’s English.

One difference between the two graphs were during the years of the First World War. Then, usage of “hate” in England spiked briefly. The U.S. didn’t have the same spike.

Another way to measure hate is provided by the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, who have been publishing a “hate map” since 2000. The map tracks hate and antigovernment groups. In the year 2000, the first year of the map, the SPLC tracked 599 hate groups across the U.S. By 2023, the number of hate groups had exploded by 240 percent to 1430.

So – yeah – it looks like we all hate a little more than we used to. I’ve talked before about Overton’s Window, that construct that defines what it is acceptable to talk about in public. And based on both these quantitative measures, it looks like “hate” is trending up. A lot.

I’m not immune to trends. I don’t personally track such things, but I’m pretty sure the word “hate” has slipped from my lips more often in the past few years. But here’s the thing. It’s almost never used towards a person I know well. It’s certainly never used towards a person I’m in the same room with. It’s almost always used towards a faceless construct that represents a person or a group of people that I really don’t know very well. It’s not like I sit down and have a coffee with them every week. And there we have one of the common catalysts of hate – something called “dehumanization.”

Dehumanization is a mental backflip where we take a group and strip them of their human qualities, including intelligence, compassion, kindness or social awareness. We in our own “in group” make those in the “out group” less than human so it’s easier to hate them. They are “stupid”, “ignorant”, “evil” or “animals”.

But an interesting thing happens when we’re forced to sit face to face with a representative from this group and actually engage then in conversation so we can learn more about them. Suddenly, we see they’re not as stupid, evil or animalistic as we thought. Sure, we might not agree with them on everything, but we don’t hate them. And the reason for this is due to another thing that makes us human, a molecule called oxytocin.

Oxytocin has been called the “Trust molecule” by neuroeconomist Paul Zak. It kicks off a neurochemical reaction that readies our brains to be empathetic and trusting. It is part of our evolved trust sensing mechanism, orchestrating a delicate dance by our prefrontal cortex and other regions like the amygdala.

But to get the oxytocin flowing, you really need to be face-to-face with a person. You need to be communicating with your whole body, not just your eyes or ears. The way we actually communicate has been called the 7-38-55 rule, thanks to research done in the 1960’s and 70’s by UCLA body language researcher Albert Mehrabian. He showed that 7% of communication is verbal, 38% is tone of voice and 55% is through body language.

It’s that 93% of communication that is critical in the building of trust. And it can only happen face to face. Unfortunately, our society has done a dramatic about-face away from communication that happens in a shared physical space towards communication that is mediated through electronic platforms. And that started to happen about 40 years ago.

Hmmm, I wonder if there’s a connection?

The World vs Big Tech

Around the world, governments have their legislative cross hairs trained on Big Tech. It’s happening in the US, the EU and here in my country,  Canada. The majority of these are anti-trust suits. But Australia has just introduced a different type of legislation, a social media ban for those under 16. And that could change the game – and the conversation -completely for Big Tech.

There are more anti-trust actions in the queue in the US than at any time in the previous five decades. The fast and loose interpretation of antitrust enforcement in the US is that monopolies are only attacked when they may cause significant harm to customers through lack of competition. The US approach to anti-trust since the 1970s has typically followed the Chicago School of neoclassical economy theory, which places all trust in the efficiency of markets and tells government to keep their damned hands off the economy. Given this and given the pro-business slant of all US administrations, both Republican and Democratic, since Reagan, it’s not surprising that we’ve seen relatively few anti-trust suits in the past 50 years.

But the rapid rise of monolithic Big Tech platforms has raised more discussion about anti-trust in the past decade than in the previous 5 decades. These platforms suck along the industries they spawn in their wake and leave little room for upstart competitors to survive long enough to gain significant market share.

Case in point: Google. 

The recent Canadian lawsuit has the Competition Bureau (our anti-trust watchdog) suing Google for anti-competitive practices selling its online advertising services north of the 49th parallel. They’re asking Google to sell off two of its ad-tech tools, pay penalties worth up to 3% of the platform’s global gross revenues and prohibit the company from engaging in anti-competitive practices in the future.

According to a 3-year inquiry into Google’s Canadian business practices by the Bureau, Google controls 90% of all ad servers and 70% of advertising networks operating in the country. Mind you, Google started the online advertising industry in the relatively green fields of Canada back when I was still railing about the ignorance of Canadian advertisers when it came to digital marketing. No one else really had a chance. But Google made sure they never got one by wrapping its gigantic arms around the industry in an anti-competitive bear hug.

The recent Australian legislation is of a different category, however. Anti-trust suits are – by nature – not personal. They are all about business. But the Australian ban puts Big Tech in the same category as Big Tobacco, Big Alcohol and Big Pharma – alleging that they are selling an addictive product that causes physical or emotional harm to individuals. And the rest of the world is closely watching what Australia does. Canada is no exception.

The most pertinent question is how will Australia enforce the band? Restricting social media access to those under 16 is not something to be considered lightly.  It’s a huge technical, legal and logistical hurdle to get over. But if Australia can figure it out, it’s certain that other jurisdictions around the world will follow in their footsteps.

This legislation opens the door to more vigorous public discourse about the impact of social media on our society. Politicians don’t introduce legislation unless they feel that – by doing so – they will continue to get elected. And the key to being elected is one of two things; give the electorate what they want or protect them against what they fear. In Australia, recent polling indicates the ban is supported by 77% of the population. Even those opposing the ban aren’t doing so in defense of social media. They’re worried that the devil might be in the details and that the legislation is being pushed through too quickly.

These types of things tend to follow a similar narrative arc: fads and trends drive widespread adoption – evidence mounts about the negative impacts – industries either ignore or actively sabotage the sources of the evidence – and, with enough critical mass, government finally gets into the act by introducing protective legislation.

With tobacco in the US, that arc took a couple of decades, from the explosion of smoking after World War II to the U.S. Surgeon General’s 1964 report linking smoking and cancer. The first warning labels on cigarette packages appeared two years later, in 1966.

We may be on the cusp of a similar movement with social media. And, once again, it’s taken 20 years. Facebook was founded in 2004.

Time will tell. In the meantime, keep an eye on what’s happening Down Under.

Is the Customer Always Right?

You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes, well, you might find
You get what you need

The Rolling Stones – 1969

When I retired from marketing 11 years ago, I did a brief stint running a tourism business, putting together custom bike tours. I thought it would be an ideal semi-retirement gig – riding bikes and hanging out with others who loved road cycling. Like many customer facing businesses, we lived and died by ratings. Because we were an experience curator, we regularly dealt with dozens of other tourism-based businesses. We were all dealing in the same currency – those elusive five-star ratings.

In theory, I think customer ratings are a good idea. But there is a dark side – the overly entitled customer that wields the threat of a negative review over the head of a proprietor. By the end of the season, all the operators we were dealing with were burnt out and frustrated. Overt entitlement sucked all the joy out of being in the tourism biz. This trend got much worse as we were pulling out of Covid. It was as if the entitled had doubled down on their demands during the pandemic. That was when I decided to hang up my cycling shoes. Life was too short to stress about catering to a bunch of whiny, demanding guests who threatened to bring the wrath of a bad TripAdvisor review down on me.

The internet’s early promise was to democratize markets that were traditionally asymmetrical. Suddenly, everyone had a voice. And, at first, it was wonderful. But predictably, we found a way to screw it up. Compared to the dumpster fire that is social media, online ratings are not pure evil, but they do have their dark side in a culture full of entitled customers.

If you doubt that North America is narcissistically entitled, I direct you to Jean Twenge and Keith Campbell’s book, the Narcissism Epidemic. Based on years of extensive research, it shows how we have fostered an age of entitlement that lives by the maxim that everyone should be treated special. That is now the baseline of expectation. We have brought this on ourselves, by insisting that we – and especially our children – receive special treatment. But, as any statistician can tell you, we can’t all be above average. Sooner or later, something has to give.

This is especially true in tourism. We all long for that magical, once-in a lifetime vacation. In fact, we now demand it. But that is impossible to deliver on. Just check into the most popular vacation destinations in the world: Paris, Rome, Barcelona, Venice and London. All are creaking under the weight of unprecedented numbers of tourist. And the supporting infrastructure can’t support it. Those places are popular because they have a sense of romance, history and magic. Everyone wants to experience strolling through the secluded streets of Rome at twilight, stopping to toss a coin into the Trevi Fountain.

But the reality is far different. Last year, Rome was invaded by an onslaught of 35 million tourists. Crowds ten to twelve deep push towards the fountain, crushing each other and providing the ideal environment for pick pockets. It’s gotten so bad; the City of Rome is looking at instituting a ticket reservation system to see the fountain.

That is the reality. Over tourism has stripped Rome of its magic. But marketing continues to push the elusive dream of the ideal Roman Holiday, leading us to believe that we’re entitled to that. Everyone else can put up with the crowds and the hassles. But not us – we’re special. And that expectation of special treatment unleashes a vicious cycle. Disappointment is sure to follow. We’ll voice our disappointment by leaving a nasty review somewhere. And some poor tourism operator who’s just trying to keep up will see his or her business slip away as the negative reviews pile up.

I do believe this idea of customer entitlement is particularly prevalent with North Americans. We have constructed it on pagan alter of crazy consumerism, as this post from on the Zendesk Blog by Susan Lahey explains, “ U.S. culture, especially American consumer culture, focuses a lot on making people feel special. After being treated like this in enough scenarios, people come to expect it. Then, when they don’t get their way, they’re upset. They feel like they have a right to act however they want towards others until they’re appeased—which winds up isolating the consumer and shaping their view of the world as ‘me against them.’ “

Lahey provides a counter-example of sustainable consumerism –aligned to a culture that embraces egalitarianism. You’ll find it in what are supposed to be the happiest countries on earth – Finland, Denmark, Iceland and Sweden: “One thing these countries have in common is a set of social norms called the Jante Laws, which say that no one is more special than anyone else. Far from making citizens unhappy, it seems to make them more resilient when they don’t get what they want.”

Less entitlement, more resiliency – that doesn’t sound like a bad plan for the future!

Democracy Dies in the Middle

As I write this, I don’t know what the outcome of the election will be. But I do know this. There has never been an U.S. Presidential election campaign quite like this one. If you were scripting a Netflix series, you couldn’t have made up a timeline like this (and this is only a sampling):

January 26 – A jury ordered Donald Trump to pay E. Jean Carroll $83 million in additional emotional, reputation-related, and punitive damages. The original award was $5 million.

April 15 – Trial of New York vs Donald Trump begins. Trump was charged with 34 counts of felony.

May 30 – Trump is found guilty on all 34 counts in his New York trial, making him the first U.S. president to be convicted of a felony

June 27 – Biden and Trump hold their first campaign debate hosted by CNN. Biden’s performance is so bad, it’s met with calls for him to suspend his campaign

July 1 – The U.S. Supreme Court delivers a 6–3 decision in Trump v. United States, ruling that Trump had absolute immunity for acts he committed as president within his core constitutional purview.  This effectively puts further legal action against Trump on hold until after the election

July 13 – Trump is shot in the ear in an assassination attempt at a campaign rally held in Butler, Pennsylvania. One bystander and the shooter are killed and two others are injured.

July 21 – Biden announces his withdrawal from the race, necessitating the start of an “emergency transition process” for the Democratic nomination. On the same day, Kamala Harris announces her candidacy for president.

September 6 – Former vice president Dick Cheney and former Congresswoman Liz Cheney announce their endorsements for Harris. That’s the former Republican Vice President and the former chair of the House Republican Conference, endorsing a Democrat.

September 15: A shooting takes place at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, while Donald Trump is golfing. Trump was unharmed in the incident and was evacuated by Secret Service personnel.

With all of that, it’s rather amazing that – according to a recent PEW Research Centre report – Americans don’t seem to be any more interested in the campaign than in previous election years. Numbers of people closely following election news are running about the same as in 2020 and are behind what they were in 2016.

This could be attributed in part to a certain ennui on the part of Democrats. In the spring, their level of interest was running behind Republicans. It was only when Joe Biden dropped out in July that Democrats started tuning in in greater numbers. As of September, they were following just as closely as Republicans.

I also find it interesting to see where they’re turning for their election coverage. For those 50 plus, it is overwhelmingly television. News websites and apps come in a distant second.

But for those under 50, Social Media is the preferred source, with news websites and television tied in second place. This is particularly true for those under 30, where half turn to Social media. The 30 to 49 cohort is the most media-diverse, with their sources pretty much evenly split between TV, websites and social media. 

If we look at political affiliations impacting where people turn to be informed, there was no great surprise. Democrats favour the three networks (CBS, NBC and ABC, with CNN just behind. Republicans Turn first to Fox News, then the three networks, then conservative talk radio.

The thing to note here is that Republicans tend to stick to news platforms known for having a right-wing perspective, where Democrats are more open to what could arguably be considered more objective sources.

It is interesting to note that this flips a bit with younger Republicans, who are more open to mainstream media like the three networks or papers like the New York Times. Sixty percent of Republicans aged 18 – 29 cited the three networks as a source of election information, and 45% mentioned the New York Times.

But we also have to remember that all younger people, Republican or Democrat, are more apt to rely on social media to learn about the election. And there we have a problem. Recently, George Washington University political scientist Dave Karpf was interviewed on CBC Radio about how Big Tech is influencing this election.  What was interesting about Karpf’s comments is how social media is now just as polarized as our society. X has become a cesspool of right-leaning misinformation, led by Trump supporter Elon Musk, and Facebook has tried to depoliticize their content after coming under repeated fire for influencing previous campaigns.

So, the two platforms that Karpf said were the most stabilized in past elections have effectively lost their status as common ground for messaging to the right and the left.  Karpf explains, “Part of what we’re seeing with this election cycle is a gap where nothing has really filled into those voids and left campaigns wondering what they can do. They’re trying things out on TikTok, they’re trying things out wherever they can, but we lack that stability. It is, in a sense, the first post social media election.”

This creates a troubling gap. If those under the age of 30 turn first to social media to be informed, what are they finding there? Not much, according to Karpf. And what they are finding is terribly biased, to the point of lacking any real objectivity.

In 2017, the Washington Post added this line under their masthead: “Democracy Dies in Darkness”. , in this polarized mediascape, I think it’s more accurate to say “Democracy Dies in the Middle”.  There’s a Right-Wing reality and a Left-Wing reality. The truth is somewhere in the middle. But it’s getting pretty hard to find it.

Not Everything is Political. Hurricanes, for Example.

During the two recent “once in a lifetime” hurricanes that happened to strike the southern US within two weeks of each other, people apparently thought they were a political plot and that meteorologists were in on the conspiracy,

Michigan meteorologist Katie Nickolaou received death threats through social media.

“I have had a bunch of people saying I created and steered the hurricane, there are people assuming we control the weather. I have had to point out that a hurricane has the energy of 10,000 nuclear bombs and we can’t hope to control that. But it’s taken a turn to more violent rhetoric, especially with people saying those who created Milton should be killed.”

Many weather scientists were simply stunned at the level of stupidity and misinformation hurled their way. After someone suggested that someone should “stop the breathing” of those that “made” the hurricanes, Nickolaou responded with this post, “Murdering meteorologists won’t stop hurricanes. I can’t believe I just had to type that.”

Washington, D.C. based meteorologist Matthew Cappucci also received threats: “Seemingly overnight, ideas that once would have been ridiculed as very fringe, outlandish viewpoints are suddenly becoming mainstream, and it’s making my job much more difficult.” 

Marjorie Taylor Greene, U.S. Representative for  Georgia’s 14th congressional district, jumped forcefully into the fray by suggesting the conspiracy was politically motivated.  She posted on X: “This is a map of hurricane affected areas with an overlay of electoral map by political party shows how hurricane devastation could affect the election.”

And just in case you’re giving her the benefit of the doubt by saying she might just be pointing out a correlation, not a cause, she doubled down with this post on X: “Yes they can control the weather, it’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.” 

You may say that when it comes to MTG, we must consider the source and sigh “You can’t cure stupid.”   But Marjorie Taylor Greene easily won a democratic election with almost 66% of the vote, which means the majority of people in her district believed in her enough to elect her as their representative. Her opponent, Marcus Flowers, is a 10-year veteran of the US Army and he served 20 years as a contractor or official for the State Department and Department of Defense. He’s no slouch. But in Georgia’s 14th Congressional district, two out of three voters decided a better choice would be the woman who believes that the Nazi Secret Police were called the Gazpacho.

I’ve talked about this before. Ad nauseum – actually. But this reaches a new level of stupidity…and stupidity on this scale is f*&king frightening. It is the most dangerous threat we as humans face.

That’s right, I said the “biggest” threat.  Bigger than climate change. Bigger than AI. Bigger than the new and very scary alliance emerging between Russia, Iran, North Korea and China. Bigger than the fact that Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and Elon Musk seem to be planning a BFF pajama party in the very near future.

All of those things can be tackled if we choose to. But if we are functionally immobilized by choosing to be represented by stupidity, we are willfully ignoring our way to a point where these existential problems – and many others we’re not aware of yet – can no longer be dealt with.

Brian Cox, a professor of particle physics at the University of Manchester and host of science TV shows including Universe and The Planets, is also warning us about rampant stupidity. “We may laugh at people who think the Earth is flat or whatever, the darker side is that, if we become unmoored from fact, we have a very serious problem when we attempt to solve big challenges, such as AI regulation, climate or avoiding global war. These are things that require contact with reality.” 

At issue here is that people are choosing politics over science. And there is nothing that tethers political to reality. Politics are built on beliefs. Science strives to be built on provable facts. If we choose politics over science, we are embracing wilful ignorance. And that will kill us.

Hurricanes offer us the best possible example of why that is so. Let’s say you, along with Marjorie Taylor Greene, believe that hurricanes are created by meteorologist and mad weather scientists. So, when those nasty meteorologists try to warn you that the storm of the century is headed directly towards you, you respond in one of two ways: You don’t believe them and/or you get mad and condemn them as part of a conspiracy on social media. Neither of those things will save you. Only accepting science as a reliable prediction of the impending reality will give you the best chance of survival, because it allows you to take action.

Maybe we can’t cure stupid. But we’d better try, because it’s going to be the death of us.

The Political Brinkmanship of Spam

I am never a fan of spam. But this is particularly true when there is an upcoming election. The level of spam I have been wading through seems to have doubled lately. We just had a provincial election here in British Columbia and all parties pulled out all stops, which included, but was not limited to; email, social media posts, robotexts and robocalls.

In Canada and the US, political campaigns are not subject to phone and text spam control laws such as our Canadian Do Not Call List legislation. There seems to be a little more restriction on email spam. A report from Nationalsecuritynews.com this past May warned that Americans would be subjected to over 16 billion political robocalls. That is a ton of spam.

During this past campaign here in B.C., I noticed that I do not respond to all spam with equal abhorrence. Ironically, the spam channels with the loosest restrictions are the ones that frustrate me the most.

There are places – like email – where I expect spam. It’s part of the rules of engagement. But there are other places where spam sneaks through and seems a greater intrusion on me. In these channels, I tend to have a more visceral reaction to spam. I get both frustrated and angry when I have to respond to an unwanted text or phone call. But with email spam, I just filter and delete without feeling like I was duped.

Why don’t we deal with all spam – no matter the channel – the same? Why do some forms of spam make us more irritated than others? It’s almost like we’ve developed a spam algorithm that dictates how irritated we get when we deal with spam.

According to an article in Scientific American, the answer might be in how the brain marshalls its own resources.

When it comes to capacity, the brain is remarkably protective. It usually defaults to the most efficient path. It likes to glide on autopilot, relying on instinct, habit and beliefs. All these things use much less cognitive energy than deliberate thinking. That’s probably why “mindfulness” is the most often quoted but least often used meme in the world today.

The resource we’re working with here is attention. Limited by the capacity of our working memory, attention is a spotlight we must use sparingly. Our working memory is only capable of handling a few discrete pieces of information at a time. Recent research suggests the limit may be around 3 to 5 “chunks” of information, and that research was done on young adults. Like most things with our brains, the capacity probably diminishes with age. Therefore, the brain is very stingy with attention. 

I think spam that somehow gets past our first line of defence – the feeling that we’re in control of filtering – makes us angry. We have been tricked into paying attention to something that was unsuspected. It becomes a control issue. In an information environment where we feel we have more control, we probably have less of a visceral response to spam. This would be true for email, where a quick scan of the items in our inbox is probably enough to filter out the spam. The amount of attention that gets hijacked by spam is minimal.

But when spam launches a sneak attack and demands a swing of attention that is beyond our control, that’s a different matter. We operate with a different mental modality when we answer a phone or respond to a text. Unlike email, we expect those channels to be relatively spam-free, or at least they are until an election campaign comes around. We go in with our spam defences down and then our brain is tricked into spending energy to focus on spurious messaging.

How does the brain conserve energy? It uses emotions. We get irritated when something commandeers our attention. The more unexpected the diversion, the greater the irritation.  Conversely, there is the equivalent of junk food for the brain – input that requires almost no thought but turns on the dopamine tap and becomes addictive. Social media is notorious for this.

This battle for our attention has been escalating for the past two decades. As we try to protect ourselves from spam with more powerful filters, those that spread spam try to find new ways to get past those filters. The reason political messaging was exempt from spam control legislation was that democracies need a well-informed electorate and during election campaigns, political parties should be able to send out accurate information about their platforms and positions.

That was the theory, anyway.

The Songs that Make Us Happy

Last Saturday was a momentous day in the world of media, especially for those of us of a certain age. Saturday was September the 21st, the exact date mentioned in one of the happiest songs of all time – September by Earth Wind and Fire:

Do you remember
The 21st night of September?
Love was changin’ the minds of pretenders
While chasin’ the clouds away

If you know the song, it is now burrowing its way deep into your brain. You can thank me later.

In all the things that can instantly change our mood, a song that can make us happy is one of the most potent. Why is that? For me, September can instantly take me to my happy place. And it’s not just me. The song often shows up somewhere on lists of the happiest songs of all time. In 2018, it was added to the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry list of sound recordings that “are culturally, historically or aesthetically important.

But what is it about this song that makes it an instant mood changer?

If you’re looking for the source of happiness in the lyrics, you won’t find it here. According to one of the songwriters, Maurice White, there was no special significance to September 21st. He just liked the way it rhymed with “remember.”

And about 30% of the full lyrical content consists of two words, neither of which mean anything: Ba-dee-ya and Ba-du-da. Even fellow songwriter Allee Willis couldn’t find meaning in the lyric, at one point begging writing partner White to let him rewrite that part – “I just said, what the f*$k does ba-dee-ya mean?”

But perhaps the secret can be found in what Willis said in a later interview, after September became one of Earth Wind and Fire’s biggest hits ever, “I learned my greatest lesson ever in songwriting … which was never let the lyric get in the way of the groove’ (for those of you not living in the seventies – “groove” is a good thing. In Gen Z speak, it would be “vibing”).

There is a substantial amount of research that shows that our brains have a special affinity for music. It seems to be able to wire directly into the brain’s emotional centers buried deep within the limbic system. Neuroimaging studies have shown that when we listen to music, our entire brain “lights up” – so we hear music at many different levels. There is perhaps no other medium that enjoys this special connection to our brains.

In 2015, Dutch neuroscientist Dr. Jacob Jolij narrowed in on the playlists that make us happy. While recognizing that music is a subjective thing (one person’s Black Sabbath is another’s Nirvana), Jolij asked people to submit their favorite feel-good tracks and analyzed them for common patterns. He found that the happiest tunes are slightly faster than your average song (between 140 and 150 beats per minute on average), written in a major key, and either about happy events or complete nonsense.

Earth Wind and Fire’s September ticked almost all of these boxes. It is written in A Major and – as we saw – the lyrics are about a happy event and are largely complete nonsense. It’s a little low on the beat per minute meter – at 126 BPM. But still, it makes me happy.

I was disappointed to see September didn’t make Dr. Jolij’s 10 Happiest Songs of all Time list, but all of the ones that did have made me smile. They are, in reverse order:
10. Walking on Sunshine – Katrina and the Waves
9. I Will Survive – Gloria Gaynor
8. Livin’ on a Prayer – Jon Bon Jovi
7. Girls Just Wanna Have Fun – Cyndi Lauper
6. I’m a Believer – The Monkees
5. Eye of the Tiger – Survivor
4. Uptown Girl – Billie Joel
3. Good Vibrations – The Beach Boys
2. Dancing Queen – ABBA

    And the happiest song of all time?

    1. Don’t Stop Me Now – Queen

    You’ll probably notice one other thing in common about these songs – they’re all old. The newest song on the list is Livin’ on a Prayer, released in 1986. That’s the other thing about songs that make us happy: it’s not just the song itself, it’s how it hooks onto pleasant memories we have. Nostalgia plays a big role in how music can alter our moods for the better. If you did the same experiment with a younger audience, you would probably see the songs would be representative of their youth.

    Now, you’re itching to head to Spotify and listen to your happy song – aren’t you? Before you do, share it with us all in the comments section!

    The Relationship Between Young(er) People and Capitalism: It’s Complicated

    If you, like me, spend any time hanging out with Millennials or Gen Z’s, you’ll know that capitalism is not their favorite thing. That’s fair enough. I have my own qualms with capitalism.

    But with capitalism, like most things, it’s not really what you say about it that counts. It’s what you do about it. And for all of us, Millennials and Gen Z included, we can talk all we want, but until we stop buying, nothing is going to change. And – based on a 2019 study from Epsilon – Gen Z and Millennials are outspending Baby Boomers in just about every consumer category.

    Say all the nasty stuff you want about capitalism and our consumption obsessed society, but the truth is – buying shit is a hard habit to break

    It’s not that hard to trace how attitudes towards capitalism have shifted over the generations that have been born since World War II, at least in North America. For four decades after the war, capitalism was generally thought to be a good thing, if only because it was juxtaposed against the bogeyman of socialism. Success was defined by working hard to get ahead, which led to all good things: buying a house and paying off the mortgage, having two vehicles in the garage and having a kitchen full of gleaming appliances. The capitalist era peaked in the 1980s: during the reign of Ronald Reagan in the US and the UK’s Margaret Thatcher.

    But then the cracks of capitalism began to show. We began to realize the Earth wasn’t immune to being relentlessly plundered. We started to see the fabric of society showing wear and tear from being constantly pulled by conspicuous consumerism. With the end of the Cold War, the rhetoric against socialism began to be dialed down. Generations who grew up during this period had – understandably – a more nuanced view towards capitalism.

    Our values and ethics are essentially formed during the first two decades of our lives. They come in part from our parents and in part from others in our generational cohort. But a critical factor in forming those values is also the environment we grow up in. And for those growing up since World War II, media has been a big part of that environment. We are – in part – formed by what we see on our various screens and feeds. Prior to 1980, you could generally count on bad guys in media being Communists or Nazis. But somewhere mid-decade, CEOs of large corporations and other Ultra-Capitalists started popping up as the villains.

    I remember what the journalist James Fallows once said when I met him at a conference in communist China. I was asking how China managed to maintain the precarious balance between a regime based on Communist ideals and a society that embraced rampant entrepreneurialism. He said that as long as each generation believed that their position tomorrow would be better than it was yesterday, they would keep embracing the systems of today.

    I think the same is true for generational attitudes towards capitalism. If we believed it was a road to a better future, we embraced it. But as soon as it looked like it might lead to diminishing returns, attitudes shifted. A recent article in The Washington Post detailed the many, many reasons why Americans under 40 are so disillusioned about capitalism. Most of it relates back to the same reason Fallows gave – they don’t trust that capitalism is the best road to a more promising tomorrow.

    And this is where it gets messy with Millennials and Gen Z. If they grew up in the developed world, they grew up in a largely capitalistic society. Pretty much everything they understand about their environment and world has been formed, rightly or wrongly, by capitalism. And that makes it difficult to try to cherry-pick your way through an increasingly problematic relationship with something that is all you’ve ever known.

    Let’s take their relationship with consumer brands, for example. Somehow, Millennials and Gen Z have managed the nifty trick of separating branding and capitalism. This is, of course, a convenient illusion. Brands are inextricably tied to capitalism. And Millennials and Gen Z are just as strongly tied to their favorite brands.

     According to a 2018 study from Ipsos, 57% of Millennials in the US always try to buy branded products. In fact, Millennials are more likely than Baby Boomers to say they rely on the brands they trust. This also extends to new brand offerings. A whopping 84% of Millennials are more likely to trust a new product from a brand they already know.

    But – you may counter – it all depends on what the brand stands for. If it is a “green” brand that aligns with the values of Gen X and Millennials, then a brand may actually be anti-capitalistic.  

    It’s a nice thought, but the Ipsos survey doesn’t support it. Only 12% of Millennials said they would choose a product or service because of a company’s responsible behavior and only 16% would boycott a product based on irresponsible corporate behavior. These numbers are about the same through every generational cohort, including Gen X and Baby Boomers.

    I won’t even delve into the thorny subject of “greenwashing” and the massive gap between what a brand says they do in their marketing and what they actually do in the real world. No one has defined what we mean by a “ethical corporation” and until someone does and puts some quantifiable targets around it, companies are free to say whatever they want when it comes to sustainability and ethical behavior.

    This same general disconnect between capitalism and marketing extends to advertising. The Ipsos study shows that – across all types of media – Millennials pay more attention to advertising than Baby Boomers and Gen X. And Millennials are also more likely to share their consumer opinions online than Boomers and Gen X. They may not like capitalism and consumerism, but they are still buying lots of stuff and talking about it.

    The only power we have to fight the toxic effects of capitalism is with our wallets. Once something becomes unprofitable, it will disappear. But – as every generation is finding out – ethical consumerism is a lot easier said than done.

    Why Time Seems to Fly Faster Every Year

    Last week, I got an email congratulating me on being on LinkedIn for 20 years.

    My first inclination was that it couldn’t be twenty years. But when I did the mental math, I realized it was right.  I first signed up in 2004. LinkedIn had just started 2 years before, in 2002.

    LinkedIn would have been my first try at a social platform. I couldn’t see the point of MySpace, which started in 2003. And I was still a couple years away from even being aware Facebook existed. It started in 2004, but it was still known as TheFacebook. It wouldn’t become open to the public until 2006, two years later, after it dropped the “The”. So, 20 years pretty much marks the sum span of my involvement with social media.

    Twenty years is a significant chunk of time. Depending on your genetics, it’s probably between a quarter and a fifth of your life. A lot can happen in 20 years. But we don’t process time the same way as we get older. 20 years when you’re 18 seems like a lot bigger chunk of time than it does when you’re in your 60’s.

    I always mark these things in my far-off distant youth by my grad year, which was in 1979. If I use that as the starting point, rolling back 20 years would take me all the way to 1959, a year that seemed pre-historic to me when I was a teenager. That was a time of sock hops, funny cars with tail fins, and Frankie Avalon. These things all belonged to a different world than the one I knew in 1979. Ancient Rome couldn’t have been further removed from my reality.

    Yet, that same span of time lies between me and the first time I set up my profile on LinkedIn. And that just seems like yesterday to me. This all got me wondering – do we process time differently as we age? The answer, it turns out, is yes. Time is time – but the perception of time is all in our heads.

    The reason why we feel time “flies” as we get older was explained in a paper published by Professor Adrian Bejan. In it, he states, “The ‘mind time’ is a sequence of images, i.e. reflections of nature that are fed by stimuli from sensory organs. The rate at which changes in mental images are perceived decreases with age, because of several physical features that change with age: saccades frequency, body size, pathways degradation, etc. “

    So, it’s not that time is moving faster, it’s just that our brain is processing it slower. If our perception of time is made up of mental snapshots of what is happening around us, we simply become slower at taking the snapshots as we get older. We notice less of what’s happening around us. I suspect it’s a combination of slower brains and perhaps not wanting to embrace a changing world quite as readily as we did when we were young. Maybe we don’t notice change because we don’t want things to change.

    If we were using a more objective yardstick (speaking of which, when is the last time you actually used a yardstick?), I’m guessing the world changed at least as much between 2004 and 2024 as it did between 1959 and 1979. If I were at 18 years old today, I’m guessing that Britney Spears, The Lord of the Rings and the last episode of Frasier would seem as ancient to me as a young Elvis, Ben-Hur and The Danny Thomas Show seemed to me then.

    To me, all these things seem like they were just yesterday. Which is probably why it comes as a bit of a shock to see a picture of Britney Spears today. She doesn’t look like the 22-year-old we remember, which we mistakenly remember as being just a few years ago. But Britney is 42 now, and as a 42-year-old, she’s held up pretty well.

    And, now that I think of it, so has LinkedIn. I still have my profile, and I still use it.

    Why The World No Longer Makes Sense

    Does it seem that the world no longer makes sense? That may not just be you. The world may in fact no longer be making sense.

    In the late 1960s, psychologist Karl Weick introduced the world to the concept of sensemaking, but we were making sense of things long before that. It’s the mental process we go through to try to reconcile who we believe we are to the world in which we find ourselves.  It’s how we give meaning to our life.

    Weick identified 7 properties critical to the process of sensemaking. I won’t mention them all, but here are three that are critical to keep in mind:

    1. Who we believe we are forms the foundation we use to make sense of the world
    2. Sensemaking needs retrospection. We need time to mull over new information we receive and form it into a narrative that makes sense to us.
    3. Sensemaking is a social activity. We look for narratives that seem plausible, and when we find them, we share them with others.

    I think you see where I’m going with this. Simply put, our ability to make sense of the world is in jeopardy, both for internal and external reasons.

    External to us, the quality of the narratives that are available to us to help us make sense of the world has nosedived in the past two decades. Prior to social media and the implosion of journalism, there was a baseline of objectivity in the narratives we were exposed to. One would hope that there was a kernel of truth buried somewhere in what we heard, read or saw on major news providers.

    But that’s not the case today. Sensationalism has taken over journalism, driven by the need for profitability by showing ads to an increasingly polarized audience. In the process, it’s dragged the narratives we need to make sense of the world to the extremes that lie on either end of common sense.

    This wouldn’t be quite as catastrophic for sensemaking if we were more skeptical. The sensemaking cycle does allow us to judge the quality of new information for ourselves, deciding whether it fits with our frame of what we believe the world to be, or if we need to update that frame. But all that validation requires time and cognitive effort. And that’s the second place where sensemaking is in jeopardy: we don’t have the time or energy to be skeptical anymore. The world moves too quickly to be mulled over.

    In essence, our sensemaking is us creating a model of the world that we can use without requiring us to think too much. It’s our own proxy for reality. And, as a model, it is subject to all the limitations that come with modeling. As the British statistician George E.P. Box said, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”

    What Box didn’t say is, the more wrong our model is, the less likely it is to be useful. And that’s the looming issue with sensemaking. The model we use to determine what is real is become less and less tethered to actual reality.

    It was exactly that problem that prompted Daniel Schmachtenberger and others to set up the Consilience Project. The idea of the Project is this – the more diversity in perspectives you can include in your model, the more likely the model is to be accurate. That’s what “consilience” means: pulling perspectives from different disciplines together to get a more accurate picture of complex issues.  It literally means the “jumping together” of knowledge.

    The Consilience Project is trying to reverse the erosion of modern sensemaking – both from an internal and external perspective – that comes from the overt polarization and the narrowing of perspective that currently typifies the information sources we use in our own sensemaking models.  As Schmachtenberger says,  “If there are whole chunks of populations that you only have pejorative strawman versions of, where you can’t explain why they think what they think without making them dumb or bad, you should be dubious of your own modeling.”

    That, in a nutshell, explains the current media landscape. No wonder nothing makes sense anymore.