"You Are Amazing"

I once listened to a TED talk about marketing. Before I get too far, let me say that I don't usually listen to TED talks because I regard them as the Cliff's Notes of lectures. I think that they are compressed bits of information designed for people with short attention spans who grew up channel flipping and surfing the web such that they can't handle a well-crafted real lecture. All of that being said, sometimes I'll watch a TED talk if the subject is one of limited interest to me on the whole, but covers a particular aspect of a topic that is of greater interest.

In this talk, the topic was about how a message is more effectively conveyed to consumers. There was discussion of how one type of ad worked better than another. For instance, does a poster that says that people dispose of X number of tons of litter each year which costs X number of dollars to clean up work better or does a poster showing a famous athlete tossing his trash in a can stop more people from littering? The answer is the latter because people are more influenced when they are told that other people are doing something than when they are informed about consequences.

This little tidbit was just part of the talk, but it highlights something which I already knew. That is the fact that messages are carefully crafted by marketers in order to optimize their influence over you. The way you are  managed is not an accident. Someone has carefully considered the message and optimized its delivery for maximum manipulation.

I thought about this several days ago when I made a rare trip to a theater to watch a movie ("Interstellar"). The movie was, as is so often the case, preceded by a sequence of ads and trailers. One of the ads was an animated short meant to get people to turn off their cell phones while watching the movie. It did not ask people to be considerate of other patrons. It did not talk about how disruptive cell phone use can be during a movie. It showed how cool it was and the animation, which was little red balls bouncing all over the places with faces on them, was energetic and hip. At the end of this short, presumably after convincing the audience to turn off their phones because it's the cool thing to do, the narrator said with great enthusiasm, "You are amazing."

When I was in Japan, most of these sorts of messages were offered in terms of, "Let's not disturb other people," or "Let's be polite to one another." In America, the message caters not to empathy and consideration toward others, but the vanity of the listener. Turn off your cell phone because it's the cool thing to do. Do it because it will mean you're "amazing".

The fact that this message is crafted to appeal to the narcissism and self-centeredness of American people made me sad. We care so little for others that asking us to do things in their interest is deemed too ineffective so we have to compliment them on their greatness in doing what is asked. What is more, saying that someone is "amazing" for turning off a cell phone smacks of rewarding people for doing next to nothing. It feels a lot like the whole "everyone who shows up gets a prize" situation that is becoming more and more present among young people today. We tell people they are great for doing nothing. We reward them for nothing.

This was not the America that I grew up in, but the one that developed while I was gone. I'm not some curmudgeon waxing poetic about the good old days because I don't think the old days were necessarily good, but I am alarmed at how self-centered people have become and how it's so natural that narcissism as a psychological problem has nearly been wiped off the map. When everyone is a narcissist, it is no longer a concern. It is a character trait common to this culture that is pandered to rather than discouraged.