In search for the new wave of fulfillness-enabling mobile consumer apps
Cards are being reshuffled once in a while. New forms that people call absurd emerge, and from there new norms come into existence. They feel so natural after a while that the old ones become universally and forever obsolete. I like to believe that this is what progress looks like.
Here are a couple of simple ones applied to all of us, either mandatory or soon to be: bicycle helmet (Imagine that professionals were running the Tour de France without one, some of them actually died as a result from this now obvious negligence), waste sorting (We’re definitely not there yet…), non smoking public areas (It took more than a century)…
Tech, from a consumer perspective, is like tobacco, it’s a chemical addiction. its intensive use doesn’t destroy people’s body but people’s mind, and roughly said not through the search of nicotine but dopamine created by the constant sollicitation from all the products that we use on our screens. We can probably abstract this addiction to the terrible power of infinite content from our social media feeds, emails and other applications…
I don’t believe that those newsfeeds on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter are a form of progress, they are primary iterations, hopefully temporary and that will look absurd in the future.
Like tobacco, abuses emerge from the mass adoption of tech products and all the addictive patterns built within. But unlike tobacco, in tech, the problem is also the solution. Apple now tracks and reports our screen time, allowing us to schedule downtime and app limits. It says a lot about how far we went into this addiction but also how aware we’ve now become. Tech is also what allows companies like Dice.fm or Side.co to transform the life of millions of people through fulfilling experience of entertainment and work respectively. If we push this paradigm further, we can hopefully predict a reshuffle of our home screens with more fulfillness-enabling tech products.
We would love to invest in the next generation of consumer apps that will transform how people find their way towards fulfillness, beautifully, explicitly, through a sustainable long term approach. Everything in regards with live interaction (that’s what zen.ly is about ultimately), self-reflection (through journaling for instance), social engagement, learning, positive productivity…
Tech has a lot of great things to offer.
And it’s just getting started.
