From marketing to mark-everything

By Michael Hewlett

If you don’t design your life, someone else will. This circumstance, essentially, is the legacy of developments in marketing.

Initially, marketers were trying to make a product more appealing so that it would sell more. But two things have changed: there are many more people doing it, and they are doing it at a very fine scale. In other words, a lot of smart people working on a project get it right more often than they get it wrong. As a result, there are subtle cues in everything that we experience that are designed to convince us to make a decision.

Marketing has gone from guiding to controlling the user experience. This is bad because the people designing your life don’t know you and their guess is not as good as yours. Moreover, you’re targeted by thousands of different people subtly persuading you to do different, sometimes conflicting things. If you have ever received mixed messages before, you know that this amounts to a mind fuck.

To clarify, this is not just about massive marketing divisions of big business, or even mini marketing teams of small businesses. The people screwing with your head might not even call what they do marketing and they might have your best interests in mind.

It’s open source persuasion, because anyone can add something to it, and, to a certain extent, everyone does.

Anyone who takes your views into account when they want you to do something has a hand in your grand design. In other words, anyone with empathy and motive - and that’s a lot of people. Here’s why you should care: they’re not just after your money. You are young and have resources to burn, including time and enthusiasm. Even gap years and volunteering are a marketable experience. Here’s how:

Travelling: You set out to Europe, Australia or Asia with thousands of dollars to spend. It’s your great adventure, so being informed about what you do before you start to travel takes away from the spontaneity of the moment. As a result, you have money to lose and are easy to convince that an experience isn’t shit; it’s authentic, and it’s culturally insensitive for you to call it shit.

‘Voluntouring’: You went there, you helped out, you did not get drunk and stumble through Thailand. You became a better person, and since the experience changed your life, it is fair game to post pictures of yourself with smiling kids on Facebook. But life changing means that your day-to-day changes somehow. Are you planning on using what you learned in Ecuador back here?

To be fair, maybe it was not about you, but the village or the orphans. Consider this: some volunteer destinations maintain low living standards so that groups will keep coming and giving capital to their village. Moreover, orphanages, with or without you, are statistically damaging institutions, which is why Canada does not have them anymore. Voluntouring is not bad and you’re probably still a great person. But if you are spending your time, money and enthusiasm to help others or to change your life, building a well while playing with orphans is no guarantee.

People are not smart or dumb; they’re informed or they’re not. Some argue that the road to self-discovery or self-improvement needs to start somewhere. It’s an appeal to randomness and chance. But with open sowurce persuasion, others have plans for you, even if you don’t plan for yourself. Shit doesn’t happen, shit is planned. Since you can’t avoid someone’s designs, make your own. If you put thought into what to do, you are more likely to be successful and get an enriching experience.

Doing this in every part of your life has a lot of overhead, but for things like your career or your personal development, the investment is worth it. Ask “Am I really getting what I want out of this?” If the answer is no, ask “Am I at least getting something useful?”