It wasn’t always thus. According to cultural historian Barbara Ehrenreich, the amount of free, spontaneous, seize-the-day living and festivity that existed in medieval and pre-industrial Europe ‘is almost beyond our imagining today’.2 There were harvest festivals and Saints’ Days full of feasting, games and revelry, and country fairs with puppetry, comedy and raucous boozing. At carnival time men dressed up as women or wild beasts, and peasants put on the robes of priests or lords in mockery of their masters. Carnival may have been a regularly scheduled tradition, but it was full of unpredictable effervescence. A dance craze swept across the continent in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. ‘People danced in both churches and cemeteries in the Middle Ages, especially on holidays such as the Feast of Fools,’ according to one chronicler, while another recorded that, in 1278, 200 people kept dancing all day on a bridge in Utrecht until it collapsed (and all of them were drowned).3 Right up to the eighteenth century working hours were hardly regular for most labourers. There were plenty of holidays, and many professions such as weavers and cobblers never worked on a Monday, which was known as ‘Saint Monday’ or ‘Cobbler’s Monday’.4 There is no doubt that daily existence was full of drudgery and destitution, misery and fear, but it was punctuated by pulses of exuberance and festivity that make contemporary life look embarrassingly dull.
How did we lose this Dionysian lust for life? The German sociologist Max Weber pointed the finger at the spread of Protestant ideals in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Puritan asceticism ‘descended like a frost’ on social life in England and other countries, and ‘turned with all its force against one thing: the spontaneous enjoyment of life and all it had to offer’.5 Church authorities abolished carnivals and festivities, while thousands of laws were introduced to ban fairs and dances, sports and theatre. In their place came a new and methodical uniformity of life that frowned upon free and exuberant living. People were expected to keep their heads down, get on with their work and attend church. ‘Wasting time’ was elevated into a deadly sin and punctuality became a virtue.6 This repressive ideology chimed perfectly with an older Christian idea, going back to St Augustine in the fifth century, that happiness was not to be enjoyed in this life but was rather a reward granted by God to true believers in the next life. In other words, we are condemned to suffer during our time on earth and should be content with delayed gratification.7 The promise of jam tomorrow should be enough to keep us happy.
Monks on the dance floor. In this Dutch painting by a follower of Hieronymus Bosch (c.1600–20), the man playing the bagpipes on the raised table represents the figure of Carnival. The woman carrying the fishes is Lent, with everyone else engaged in carpe diem revelry before fasting begins.
Carpe diem was not extinguished by Christianity alone. A more powerful and pervasive force was the spread of industrial capitalism and its greatest weapon: the factory clock. From around the eighteenth century, the growth of urban industrialisation engulfed millions of workers in a more controlled and regimented way of life that served the interests of bourgeois business. The clock punished labourers who turned up late by docking their pay, and kept them confined in textile mills and coal mines until the final whistle. Between 1780 and 1830, wrote the historian E.P. Thompson, ‘the “average” English working man became more disciplined, more subject to the productive tempo of “the clock”, more reserved and methodical, less violent and less spontaneous’.8 This discipline was reinforced by Henry Ford’s innovation of the moving assembly line in 1913, and the introduction of ‘time and motion’ studies that ratcheted up the pace of factory work in an effort to increase productivity and efficiency.
This might all sound like history, but its legacy permeates our minds today. It explains why a friend of mine greets me by asking, ‘Have you had a productive morning?’ It’s why we often feel guilty about ‘wasting time’, as if we have some Puritan preacher inside our brains nudging us not to be idle. It’s one of the reasons why we schedule so many activities for our kids after school and on weekends, robbing them of free and self-directed play. It’s why we are constantly checking the time on the clocks that have colonised our phones, wrists, bedside tables, computers, microwave ovens and city streets. It’s why another friend consults the calendar on her phone when I suggest meeting up for a coffee and says, only half-joking, ‘I’ll see if I can fit you in.’ Most of us are too busy to seize the day, and we hardly notice what we are missing. The freedoms of the pre-industrial past seem to have been erased from our cultural memory.
We live in what the French philosopher Michel Foucault called a ‘disciplined’ society, where order and control – much of it self-imposed – are far more pervasive than we care to admit.9 In the last two decades, the drive for discipline and efficiency has been reinforced and exacerbated by what I think of as an ‘info bomb’ that has exploded on our screens and inside our minds.10 In 1621 the writer Robert Burton, who had 1,700 books in his capacious library, complained about the problem of growing information overload: ‘new books every day, pamphlets, currantoes, stories, whole volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies’.11 But nobody could have prepared him for the digital glut today – millions of Wikipedia entries and YouTube videos, billions of tweets, Facebook updates and cc’d emails. Through the Tardis-like portal of our phones we can access a world resembling the universal library that Jorge Luis Borges described in his 1941 story ‘The Library of Babel’, which contains every book in every language, the faithful catalogue of the library and every false catalogue, commentaries on the gospels and commentaries on those commentaries.
Discipline is currently imposed on us not just by the legacy of the factory clock and the pious preacher, but by digital overload. We attempt to invent efficient systems to deal with it all – smart ways of filtering our emails, rationing our social media time, apps to help us tag and organise articles we want to read, catching up with podcasts while jogging and newsfeeds on the toilet (75% of people use their phones there) – but it is hard not to feel overwhelmed.12 Multitasking is a common strategy to deal with the overflow of bits and bytes filling our lives, but we are less adept at it than we think: typically we switch rapidly between tasks rather than do them simultaneously, and become less efficient in the process, in part because the quick switching triggers production of the stress hormone cortisol. This can generate some scary statistics: knowing there is an unread email sitting in your inbox while you are focusing on another task can reduce your effective IQ by ten points.13
The end result is that we spend an enormous amount of time and energy trying to manage the flood of information, and all the choices and decisions that it generates. We no longer just choose – we choose how to choose, becoming metamanagers of our digital selves.14
Why do we find it so difficult to handle the info bomb? One reason is that our brains are not well calibrated to deal with such electronic abundance. The prefrontal cortex has a novelty bias, so we are easily distracted by a new text message or video that pops up on the screen and issues its siren call ‘click me’. Attending to them releases a burst of feel-good opioids that rewards us for diverting our focus (even if at the end we curse ourselves for what might turn into a twenty-minute digression of following links).
According to Tristan Harris, a former ‘design ethicist’ at Google, part of the problem is that digital technology is designed so it ‘hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities’. One way this is done is through offering ‘intermittent variable rewards’, which is how slot machines create millions of addicts: you pull the lever and immediately either win an enticing reward or receive nothing, and get addicted by the hope that next time might be your lucky day. In effect, says Harris, ‘Several billion people have a slot machine in their pocket.’ We take out our phone and press refresh, hoping we have new email, or tap a social media icon to check if we have new notifications. And then we can’t help going back for more, just in case we win.15 If you think you’re not a victim, down
load an app named Checky, which tells you how often you unlock your phone each day – and get ready for a nasty shock.
In the face of all these emails, messages and other digital offerings, we may strive to be efficient, schedule our time meticulously, and feel a surge of satisfaction when we tick items off our To Do list. But there is a cost to this apparently benevolent management mentality: it is squeezing more and more carpe diem spirit out of our lives, with the result that we just plan it instead of just do it. We have almost forgotten how to be free and spontaneous, to grasp the moment and immerse ourselves in the present like our dance-crazy medieval forebears. This is an astonishing cultural loss that amounts to a surreptitious hijacking of our seize-the-day souls.
JUST BUY IT: HOW NIKE TAUGHT US TO SEIZE THE CREDIT CARD
They don’t wear balaclavas. They don’t have guns or issue ransom notes. You know them by their clever aliases – ‘brand strategist’, ‘planner’, ‘creative’ and ‘e-commerce manager’. Yes, it’s the advertising and marketing industry. And they are out to hijack your carpe diem.
Since the rise of psychoanalysis in the 1920s, the brains behind the brands – along with psychologists in their pay – have attempted to trigger our emotions, stimulate our unconscious desires and spark our psyches so that we buy more stuff and fuel our turbo-charged consumer culture. One of the most potent strategies used by the hijackers has been to create environments and messaging that tap into our seize-the-day instincts. Shopping is deliberately structured to encourage the human propensity for impulsive behaviour and the desire for instant gratification that exist alongside our more risk-averse and cautious selves.
A good example is what marketing experts call ‘store positioning’. At almost every supermarket checkout you will find snack foods, discount goods and celebrity gossip magazines, placed specifically to induce a seize-the-day impulse purchase. We are especially prone to this, argue psychologists, because an exhausting supermarket trip during which our brains often make hundreds of decisions as we go up and down the aisles can lead to what is known as ‘decision fatigue’. By the time we reach the checkout, our limited store of willpower has gone and we just can’t resist popping a chocolate bar into the cart. It’s a case of seize the sugar.16 These positioning strategies help explain why around 40% of people spend more than they had planned in stores, and one-third report making a sizeable impulse purchase every week, averaging $30 in value. In the United States, impulse buying generates over $4 billion in sales annually.17
Another method is the use of language designed to channel our carpe diem instincts by signalling windows of opportunity – what in marketing jargon is known as the ‘scarcity sell’. Think of those sales signs blaring out ‘While Supplies Last!’, ‘Going Out of Business Sale!’ or the slogan ‘When It’s Gone It’s Gone!’ used by Tesco supermarkets and other retailers (by the way, red and yellow signs apparently work best). The invention of Black Friday has taken it all further, with frenzied crowds rushing into stores offering ‘for one day only’ mega sales.
These strategies are far from new, and go back to the emergence of seasonal sales in department stores such as Selfridges, Macy’s and Bon Marché after World War One.18 The founder of Selfridges, Harry Gordon Selfridge, would be impressed by the way today’s technology has transformed retailing and created new opportunities for impulse buying. How many of us can resist the quick and easy convenience of online shopping and the temptations of that one-click button, with the added bonus of super-fast delivery options? One need look no further than Amazon’s extraordinary sales statistics for evidence. More than 304 million people worldwide now have Amazon accounts, while the number of Amazon Prime customers – who pay a premium for high-speed shipping and other benefits – has reached 54 million in the US alone, with each of them spending on average $1100 per year.19
Shopping both online and offline can often feel like an exciting or spontaneous seize-the-day experience, although I doubt whether Horace wrote Ode XI to inspire us to get a bargain down at the Forum. Yet this only touches the surface of the way that consumer culture hijacks the carpe diem ideal. To explore how this happens at a deeper, more systemic level, it’s worth looking at the ultimate just-do-it company: Nike.
Throughout the 1980s Nike was losing ground against its corporate rival Reebok, which was dominating the booming aerobics and fitness market. But between 1988 and 1998 Nike managed to turn the tables, increasing its share of the US sports-shoe business from 18% to 43%, and boosting worldwide sales from $877 million to $9.2 billion. Within just ten years – and despite vigorous campaigning against its reliance on sweatshop labour – the company convinced millions of people to start wearing sports shoes and athletics clothing not simply for jogging or playing basketball, but as everyday fashion items. By the early 1990s the average American owned four pairs of athletics shoes, and the typical boy had more than double that number.20 An estimated 80% of Nike sneakers were never used for the activities for which they were designed: they were worn far more to pad around shopping malls than to race on running tracks.21
How did Nike manage this spectacular marketing achievement? The key was their new carpe diem advertising slogan: Just Do It. Launched in 1988 and still going strong today, Just Do It is regularly rated as one of the most successful brand campaigns of all time. Targeted not only at athletic males – the focus of Nike’s early advertising strategy – the new campaign sought to attract everyone from working women and pot-bellied dads to insecure teenagers and high-style fashionistas. The slogan cleverly tapped into both the emerging obsession with personal health as well as an expanding desire for personal growth in every aspect of life. Using celebrity sporting heroes like Michael Jordan covered with the Nike swoosh logo, it sent the message that whoever you are and whatever you do, with grit and determination you can overcome the odds and achieve greatness. Soon posters could be found in gyms, college dorms and workplaces, showing a runner on a country road accompanied by the message: ‘There are clubs you can’t belong to, neighborhoods you can’t live in, schools you can’t get into, but the road is always open. Just do it.’22 The advertising campaign not only enthused couch potatoes to take up marathon running, but sparked some people to leave their abusive relationships, and even attempt heroic rescues from burning buildings.23 And of course it sold a lot of shoes: by the turn of the millennium Nike was selling around 100 million pairs a year.24 Just Do It had become Just Buy It.
The genius of Nike’s strategy was that it was not ingenious at all. It was simply based on one of the mainstays of the growth of consumer capitalism, which has been to link the act of shopping with the transformation of the self. For nearly a century advertising has focused on selling us not just products but lifestyle aspirations and the promise of personal change.25 Forget Gandhi’s advice to be the change you want to see in the world – advertising convinces us to buy the change we want to see in ourselves. By paying $100 for a pair of shoes, you too could reinvent who you are, becoming faster, stronger, more successful, and better than the rest. You could become just a little bit like Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods or Maria Sharapova. That’s an almost irresistible bargain. This kind of celebrity-led strategy certainly worked on me. I remember getting my first pair of Nike tennis shoes as an aspiring junior player, and not just experiencing a feeling of athletic speed and lightness but literally feeling more confident – as if I could step in and return serve like my Nike-sponsored idol John McEnroe.
By offering a formula for refashioning the self, Nike’s strategy – like all advertising that invites us to reinvent who we are, whether through the clothes we wear or the car we drive – drew a growing share of our life choices into the realm of material consumption. This was part of a larger cultural process evident since the 1970s in which we increasingly sought out self-esteem, social recognition, personal expression and a sense of belonging through our consumer purchases. A new philosophy of life was starting to dominate Western society: I shop, therefore I am. The cultural critic
John Berger commented on this development in his 1972 book and documentary film Ways of Seeing:
Publicity is not merely an assembly of competing images: it is a language in itself which is always being used to make the same general proposal. Within publicity, choices are offered between this cream and that cream, that car and this car, but publicity as a system only makes a single proposal. It proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something more.26
The consequences for seizing the day have been devastating. If we accept consumerism as a key to self-transformation, then this is where we are likely to focus more and more of our carpe diem energies. In doing so, we end up turning our backs on life experiences that cannot be easily found in retail outlets or online shopping emporiums. As the social commentator George Monbiot puts it: ‘How many [of our ancestors] would have guessed that people possessed of unimaginable wealth and leisure and liberty would spend their time shopping for onion goggles and wheatgrass juicers? Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chainstores.’27
For the first time in history, shopping has become one of our most popular leisure activities, so instead of seizing the day we’re busy seizing the credit card.28 Consumer culture has crowded out a huge range of vibrant, exciting and potentially meaningful pursuits: not only epic personal adventures like mountain climbing, but also more everyday experiences like joining a jive class or playing Ultimate Frisbee with friends. And what has consumerism replaced these with? A bland version of liberty that redefines freedom as a choice between brands. In the 1990s it was Nike or Reebok. Today it is more likely Nike or Adidas, iPhone or Samsung, or that old favourite dilemma of Coke or Pepsi.29 As our attention gets distracted by a daily assault of billboard advertising, pop-up ads and TV commercials, we begin to lose touch with what is really valuable in life, and our seize-the-day vitality becomes enmeshed in a multitude of relatively trivial choices.
Carpe Diem Regained Page 6