Consumer Escapes - Driving Alone on the Open Road

The following is excerpted from an article in Men's Health, April 2010, by Dan Neil. I noted it as a MUST post. On this beautiful spring day it also makes me want to go for a ride. Enjoy ...
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It's a trope of pop psychology that a man needs time to sulk and suck his paw -- that men are different from their it-takes-a-village counterparts. And yet it's the truth. This bit of wiring in a man's brain may be the evolutionary product of eons of lonely hunting and gathering; however he came by it, his impulse to be alone runs deep.

The solo car trip is one of the few activities that lets men be alone without having their solitude pathologized. Try telling your friends and family that you'll be spending a few days at the beach alone, or going off sailing by yourself. The reaction is likely to be disbelief or worry. One of the many amusing aspects of South Carolina governor Mark Sanford's fall from grace was his alibi -- that he was hiking the Appalachian Trail alone. (He was in Argentina, in fact, visiting his girlfriend.) The very notion of hiking alone seemed enough to make people doubt his mental health. What if he'd said he was just going for a drive?

Long-distance driving has emerged in literature, from Jack Kerouac to Stephen King, as a kind of American zen, a practice of falling into the massive hypnotism of the road, mindful of the moment, the scenery scrolling by in its peripheral totality. A week on the road alone is a rare and fantastic gift to myself. I can start to hear myself think. On the first day, I rehash arguments with former girlfriends and wives. On the second day, I commune with the spirit of my father, gone 30 years. By day three, I can actually start producing new thoughts. I start thinking about changing the world.

A bad day on the open road is . . . well, there is no bad day.

Link to full article

Consumer Escapes - Retro Decorating

We've been talking about renovating our kitchen for years. One element in our plan is to install a double oven. I find the planning itself to be an escape. The actual remodeling is painful. It takes longer than expected and costs more than planned.

Inspiration often comes from flipping through remodeling magazines. Although everything starts to look the same. Maybe if the appliance advertising was more like this classic from the 70's our kitchen would be done by now.

Come to think of it, my parent's house had a Thermodor oven when I was a kid. Hmm, wonder who was reading remodeling magazines back then?

Consumer Escapes - Reading around the edges

This morning I had the pleasure to listen to a talk at The Roeper School by Don Ambrose, Ph.D. Acting Associate Dean, College of Liberal Arts, Education, & Sciences and Professor of Graduate Education at Rider College in New Jersey. Don was speaking about the foundations for gifted education and creative intelligence. One topic area he covered gave me permission to keep doing something I've been doing. He called it "reading around the edges." Basically as students and organizations deal with a rapidly changing world we must have greater interdisciplinary understanding. So a scientist can get inspiration from art; a writer gains discovery through an appreciation for music; and so on.

My wife with her Kindle (see earlier post) said that the device will only gain in popularity because people can't judge you by what you're reading. No one knows if you're reading a trashy romance novel or today's newspaper. But as I think about what Dr. Ambrose outlined, I can read anything proudly, so far as it's contributing to broadening my horizons. This weekend we'll see just how effective reading Maxim is in helping me escape from cognitive traps.

Consumer Escapes - Vintage Advertising

A colleague turned me on to a great site to spend a few minutes with called “Found in Mom’s Basement.” It's a well-organized collection of vintage advertising. In many cases the Mad Men were mad. Dust 'em off and take a look.

Link to Found in Mom's Basement

Consumer Escapes - Collecting Marathons

This Sunday I will be running the Mississauga Marathon. The race takes place on what looks to be a beautiful, scenic course in suburban Toronto. If I successfully finish this race I will only have to run New York and Montreal to complete the "Original Six" series of marathons. Devoted hockey fans will know that refers to the original six teams in the NHL. Those teams were and are the Detroit Red Wings, the Chicago Blackhawks, the Montreal Canadiens, the Toronto Maple Leafs, the Boston Bruins, and the New York Rangers. (No accident to which team I listed first.)

Just before a marathon I am frequently asked two questions. The first, how far is it or is this the 26 mile kind? To which I answer yes it's the 26.2 mile kind. 

The other question I get is, "why do you do that?"

My answer is rarely prosaic. So allow me to note what Roger Bannister, the first man ever to run a mile in under four minutes, wrote in his aptly named book Four Minute Mile, "[Running] gives a man or woman the chance to bring out power that might otherwise remain locked away inside. The urge to struggle lies in everyone. The more restricted our society and work become, the more necessary it will be to find some outlet for this craving for freedom. No one can say, 'You must not run faster than this, or jump higher than that.' The human spirit is indomitable."

Thank you Dr. Bannister for giving me something to think about during the race. I need it since my race will take more than 50 times as long as your record-setting mile.

Consumer Escapes - The Kindle

A few years ago I was roundly chastised for buying my wife a Mother's Day present that plugged in. It was an appliance of some sort that I thought was cool, and it was received quite "coolly." OK so it wasn't jewelry. Since then I've worked hard to avoid gifts that have a plug. Until this year when I decided to get my wife a Kindle. I figured it only plugs in every few weeks, the rest of the time it's a sleek, sexy portable device with the promise of hundreds of books at her fingertips.

My daughter and I encouraged my wife to open her present on Friday evening. We knew she'd be consumed with other responsibilities on the Sunday of Mother's Day. She's been "plugged into" her Kindle since. Not simply hooked, she loves the device and she's barely even explored the capabilities. (Guess that's because she read a whole book already.) She's even picking out Kindle accessories from Amazon.com. Try doing that with a waffle iron.

My family also purchased a Kindle for my Mom for Mother's Day. I don't know if she's had the same immediate Kindle love. My Mom loves to escape with a good book, so I hope she gets the same pleasure out of the Kindle.

In chronicling these two new additions to the Kindle family I realized that my mother and wife are my two best sources for new books to read; whether it's a great find at the library, the new bestseller from Costco or an old classic. That's going to change greatly. But Father's Day is only 41 days away (not that I'm counting or anything) and I have no problem with gifts that plug in.

Consumer Escapes - Conceptual Consumption

The other day my daughter was dressed in some form of yoga-like garb. I affectionately called her a "poser." Then this morning in digging through a file I came across a 1999 New York Times Magazine article by Rob Walker entitled "Marketing Pose - Saluting the Sun in a Downward-Dog Economy." I love it when my worlds collide. In this article Walker introduced me to the concept of "conceptual consumption." I was very interested so I dug up the article by Dan Ariely and Michael I. Norton that appeared in the Harvard Review of Psychology. The following is a portion of the Introduction to their article.

INTRODUCTION
Although consumption is fundamental to all forms of life, human consumption is extraordinary in its variety and sheer inventiveness. Some physical consumption, such as food and water, is essential for basic survival and thus shared with other organisms, but humans are remarkable in the scale of consumption over and above meeting basic needs, and indeed in the way that even “basic” consumption is embellished and elaborated—consider, for example, the sheer number of brands of bottled water. The centrality of consumption is not unique to the modern age, of course, nor is it unique to humans. Animals spend much of their time searching for food and consuming it; similarly, our ancestors spent much of their time foraging for, preparing, and consuming food (Kaplan 2000, Sahlins 1972). With modern technology, however, the nature of consumption has changed: Whereas our ancestors needed a minimum of some 15– 20 hours per week to gather and prepare food, the current U.S. consumer can accomplish the same tasks with one 30-minute trip to a supermarket per week and 30 minutes per day preparing meals, thanks to innovations such as microwave ovens and instant meals.

But how do humans use this additional time?

One avenue that humans clearly pursue is overconsumption of food; having evolved in an environment where food was both scarce and unpredictable such that eating to our physical limit when food was available was a dominant strategy, continuing to apply this rule mindlessly when food is abundant underlies modern obesity epidemics (Pinel et al. 2000, Wansink 2006). In addition to hunger for food and thirst for water shared with other animals, however, humans use this additional time to address their unique—and seemingly— insatiable appetite for consumption of information, so much so that Schelling (1984) famously called the mind a “consuming organ,” and Borgmann (2000) wrote that “to live is to consume.” The staggering amount of time people spend reading blogs about celebrities attests to this appetite; more broadly, evidence can be found in human desires for stories (originally through oral storytelling, and increasingly through books and movies), for rumors and gossip, for news, for cultural memes, and so on (see Allport & Postman 1947, Dawkins 1976, Heath et al. 2001, Sinaceur & Heath 2005).

Thus, in some sense people have switched from consuming food (foraging for nuts) to consuming ideas (foraging for information in blogs). Although not a literal one-to-one exchange of consumption of food for consumption of ideas, we suggest a basic property of human consumption:

As basic needs are met with greater ease and celerity, humans find a wide variety of increasingly psychological avenues for quenching their consumption thirst. Even the labor with which humans have replaced hunting and foraging is telling, as countries transition from manufacturing to knowledge economies (Drucker 1959), where both the production and consumption of ideas are paramount. Shirky (2008), for example, has noted that whereas Americans spend some 200 billion hours per year watching television, Wikipedia—the online dictionary whose intellectual content is generated entirely by unpaid contributors— now represents roughly 100 million hours of human thought, a novel and promising use of excess consumption energy.

You can download the full abstract at www.people.hbs.edu/mnorton/ariely%20norton%202009.pdf
May it quench your appetite for consumption of information.