Citizens of time

I’ve been thinking about a new habit at work which wasn’t really on purpose, just happened, but maybe has a pattern to it. Or maybe it’s just a random thing I happen to do and I am now post-rationalising to make sense of my world and create the illusion of progress, because hey, strategists will be strategists. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But let’s assume it’s the former. And it’s based on the relationship between language, music, mood and work. To paraphrase the key lesson in the superb movie Arrival (a much needed refresh of the big bad explosion-ruled alien sci-fi genre), the language we speak changes how we think. By logic, it’s easy to argue that therefore the music we listen to changes how we think as well.

Music, after all, is language, codified to convey or create a certain mood. So the music we listen to, much like the language we speak, changes our brains — and by association the words that come out, whether spoken (e.g. a romantic thing you said while listening to romantic music) or written (e.g. the urban-depressive diary entries of your 14-year old self while listening to Limp Bizkit, because yeah I was a kid of the 90s).

So, coming back to how this changes work, I’ve been noticing that while doing brand strategy — usually a very chaotic, very progressive, very mind-numbing after 10 hours straight thinking about it until it’s time to relax and do more of that the next day and get the kicks once more — I tend to have a particular taste for music. And what’s interesting about that taste for music is that I don’t listen to the stuff that’s out now. I tend to listen to very old things. Things like 1960s blues, 1940s jazz, 19th century classical.

Which then got me thinking — is there a relationship between this and the types of things I try and come up with on paper? And to my amusement I thought, well maybe it’s got something to do with the balance between timelessness and modernity. Which is to say, a balancing of the things that are true to us as social and cultural animals and the things that are changing our very nature, attitudes and behaviours (i.e. DIGITAL, your favourite word right now).

The old meets the new, and hopefully out of that comes… something else entirely? This makes me think about how Austin Kleon keeps talking about how going way back in your references, back to where no one else thought of looking, you might get a far away enough source of inspiration to truly think new thoughts. Because originality is a myth and new things are just non-obvious combinations of other things, and all that.

So going back to old music seems to be my way of counter-balancing the anxieties of modern life with thoughts that are 60-years old and therefore, maybe, provide some sense of distance which therefore creates clarity? In simpler terms, maybe by stepping back to a different culture, created in a different time, is what helps me get a bit more perspective on the things that afflict us as a species today.

Which then, in theory, helps create something more novel or interesting than, say, regurgitating ‘insights’ from millennial reports about how we’re all communal now, or quoting Drake lyrics to support the idea that modern young urban consumers could also be called Melancholic Moolah Cravers or some shit that you probably have already seen elsewhere.

(h/t @douchebagstrat, although not really because I just made it up, but might has well have been because it sounds super legit in a very non-legit and very bullshitty way)

With this, I’m left with the idea that plugging in some Wagner while developing progressive cultural ideas for brands in 2017 and beyond might create a new dynamic in how we look at our ‘globalised selves’. In other words, instead of ‘citizens of the world’, which you could argue (while sounding like it’s 1997) most people who use the internet are, we’re citizens of time.

By being citizens of time, we then assume that reading is, maybe, time travel? And the further you read, about further different types of things, you travel to different times, which are also different places? Quite ethereal and ‘meta’, I know, but think about it. We think of the timelessness of things and contrast it with the novelty of things, because after all nothing has meaning unless it’s paired with other things that then convey meaning to it. For example, we can’t say we’re a less equal society if we can’t prove that we were more equal 50 years ago.

Therefore, by expanding our knowledge base way beyond what we see today and contrast that with what was yesterday and 100 years ago, we might be better off for it. It doesn’t have to mean that we should now go read 200-year old books to make sense of modern dad body image issues or something, but maybe sometimes it does — just look at how the ‘technology is stealing our jobs’ argument has been around since we perceived any new invention to be a piece of technology, or how ‘fake news’ go back to good ol’ Ben Franklin who, well, used them for ‘good reasons’ around the independence from the British Empire, but still they were as FAKE as your latest ‘President-elect Trump’ claim about [insert literally anything].

So, a new habit, something simple like enjoying jazz while I’m thinking and writing down things, led down this humongous rabbit-hole-slash-stream-of-consciousness which hopefully makes sense outside of my head. Citizens of the world is all fine and dandy, but I quite like this idea of being a citizen of time. At least, it helps us frame the sources of our inspiration in a slightly different light, and maybe, just maybe, it will help us cure the addiction of novelty as a proxy for substance — because really, if ‘people love socialising’ is a true insight of the 21st century and wasn’t true in the 7th century, explain tribes and religion and culture. Exactly.

If you made it this far, sorry about that! And congratulations. And thank you. And if you’ve found value in this, please do recommend it below. I’ll pay you in coffee next time we meet.