Note 8: What the marketing industry taught me about the opportunities of a personal crisis
I have to admit that even when I began writing these notes, I didn’t really see the past two years as a midlife crisis. I saw this as an experiment, to view experiences through another lens, but eight notes into the process I’m starting to realize that there is no way around it: it is a midlife crisis.
I’ve been thinking about why it’s been so hard for me to accept that I’m going through a midlife crisis. One reason is that a crisis is supposed to be hard. Most of the process hasn’t been hard, on the contrary, it’s been an amazing ride that surprised me just when I thought I had the rollercoaster that is life figured out. But I realize that parts of it have been hard. It’s been hard on my relationship, because the ratio of changes (both subtle and not-so-subtle) over time was intense even for me (and I’m something of a thrill seeker). It’s been hard on me, because the ~8 month period of depression and anxiety that was part of my second year took it’s toll both financially and physically. I wouldn’t want to go through it again, but I learned a lot in that process for which I’m grateful for. “If a sword had memory, it might be grateful to the forge fire, but never fond of it.” is a quote that very well describes my feelings about the darker parts of this process.
Another reason is that I believed that midlife crisis is about age. I mean, it’s right there, built into the name. And looking at the trope of a middle aged man going through such a period (or a woman, for that matter) it’s all about attempts at experiencing youth again. Getting a sports car, or a motorcycle, a young lover (and in the process often severing a long relationship, which I’ve always interpreted as reaching for a chance to start again), getting on a health craze (which more often than not is designed as much to keep aging at bay, as it is to keep you healthy). I’ve now learned that a midlife crisis is age-adjacent, that it seems that at certain stages in life we reach checkpoints of sorts, where we make inventory of our lives from different aspects. Writing this, I had to look up the definition of midlife crisis on Wikipedia, and I have to say that it nails it (it turns out the stereotype has some truth to it, as the definition includes “or the desire to achieve youthfulness” — that or is important)
The phenomenon is described as a psychological crisis brought about by events that highlight a person’s growing age, inevitable mortality, and possibly shortcomings of accomplishments in life. This may produce feelings of depression, remorse, and anxiety, or the desire to achieve youthfulness or make drastic changes to their current lifestyle. — Wikipedia article about midlife crisis
Remorse: No. Depression: check. Anxiety: check. (I’ll return to these in future notes). Drastic changes to current lifestyle: check. I went vegan. I quit my job and pretty much made it impossible for me to keep working in the marketing industry, as I also quit Facebook, effectively crippling my freelance career (such as it was) before it had time to take off. (I have to admit, that as a networking tool, it’s amazing for introverts like me, but the choice of going back has so many consequences on so many levels, that it simply isn’t worth it.)
One reason I’m not comfortable in the marketing and communications industry anymore is because the line between manipulation and marketing is non-existent. PR, as practiced by the industry, is manipulation of truth to create truthiness so that the client looks better than they actually are. I‘m not saying everyone in the industry is an evil mastermind hellbent on brainwashing people, but the line between marketing and manipulation today is thin. The fact that there is a line, albeit thin, creates an illusion that there’s somewhere the slippery slope stops. In practice, there are some deeply problematic behaviors where marketers use insights from behavioral psychology to get us to do what the marketer wants. I don’t believe that the people at Facebook who thought up this pitch (TL;DR: targeting ads to teens in vulnerable emotional states) are evil. They simply lost track of what is important, confused metrics for goals, and had nobody in the organization to be their conscience (the Romans got this part right, and I believe every major decision maker should have a person whose livelihood doesn’t depend on pleasing the decision maker/the organization)
When the marketing offers seem very generous, it’s because the house always wins. Marketers know that humans are lazy (or rather, prone to reserve energy). The result of this is that we stick to habits and brands unless there is internal or external pressure to change, and let’s face it: who really feels any internal pressure to change the brand of toilet paper they use? Or detergent? Diapers? No, we stick to our habits, but this is not the insight from behavioral psychology. The insight is that big changes in our lives are a great opportunity to form new habits. This is why pregnant parents (at least in Sweden) get very generous gifts from diaper brands: once you’ve chosen your brand, the chance of you sticking with that brand for however long the kid wear’s diapers is high enough enough to yield a nice return-on-investment (on a national level). Moving to a new place, and divorce are two other marketing opportunities (but not necessarily getting married, unless it also means that one or both are moving). The problem isn’t this knowledge, it’s that Facebook, Twitter and Google provide powerful tools to marketers with little regard for the consequences. (Again: Facebook actually pitched to clients that they could target ads to teens in vulnerable emotional states.) The problem is that our understanding of ourselves is turned against our (and often, against our planet’s) best interest to make us buy one more thing we don’t really need.
The note here is: a crisis can only be fixed by acceptance and change (the Serenity Prayer is actually a great mantra for a personal crisis). Change is hard, but when it’s brought on by a crisis, it presents one of the greatest opportunities for you to reprogram yourself. To create new habits. To become more of the person your dog thinks you are.
