THE ILLUSION OF CHOICE
So consumer culture, TV and digital media are hijacking our drive to seize the day – and we hardly even notice. How could we be so blind to this major existential crime? One reason is that we are bombarded with cultural messaging telling us that we live in an era of unprecedented choice. Experts ranging from economists and technology gurus to marketing professors and psychologists claim that greater choice is a defining characteristic of our times.49 In some ways they are right. When I do my weekly online supermarket shop there are over 1,600 organic items alone that I can click on, while digital TV has exponentially expanded our range of viewing options, and the advent of cheap flights has opened the frontiers of travel to millions.
This apparent abundance of choices gives us the feeling that the possibilities for seizing the day have expanded too. If the range of pathways has multiplied and we have more freedom, then it stands to reason that there is more scope for being experimental with our choices, travelling in new directions and deciding to live in the moment.
But in truth, our age of choice is an illusion of near-mythic proportions. Due to the hijacking we’ve been looking at, in some of the most vital realms of life our choices have diminished, disappeared or been manipulated and trivialised into insignificance.
How can we win back carpe diem and outsmart the hijackers in the process? The trick here is not to approach our assailants head on by directly attempting to fight the cult of efficiency, overthrow the juggernaut of consumerism or eradicate our addiction to television. These would be losing battles. A wiser and defter strategy is to put something better in their place so that we are positively drawn to alternative choices and ways of living. We must create a picture of what seizing the day could really look like in today’s world – an image of carpe diem to which we can aspire. It is time to turn to the five key ways that humanity has discovered over the centuries to seize the day: opportunity, hedonism, presence, spontaneity and politics. Their inspiration is our greatest hope for disarming the hijackers and reclaiming our freedoms.
Notes
1 http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/dec/14/britons-learned-art-last-minute-living
2 Ehrenreich 2006, 91.
3 Ehrenreich 2006, 79, 85.
4 Thompson 1968, 448.
5 Weber 1958, 166, 168.
6 Ehrenreich 2006, 99; Weber 1958, 157.
7 Camus 2005, 80; McMahon 2006, 104.
8 Thompson 1968, 450–451.
9 Foucault 1979, 298-306; Young 2008, 78.
10 Thanks to the economist Peter Antonioni for enlightening me on the idea of an ‘info bomb’.
11 Burton 1838, 3.
12 http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/fun/news/a464219/75-percent-of-people-use-their-phone-on-the-toilet.html#~paG8CyVh1J6R2n
13 http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/18/modern-world-bad-for-brain-daniel-j-levitin-organized-mind-information-overload
14 Rosenthal 2005, 33–35.
15 https://medium.com/swlh/how-technology-hijacks-peoples-minds-from-a-magician-and-google-s-design-ethicist-56d62ef5edf3#.c7y7hiu9e
16 Kringelbach and Phillips 2014, 164–165; Baumeister and Tierney 2012, 104.
17 http://blog.vendhq.com/post/64901826173/encourage-impulse-buys-store-deeper-look-unplanned-purchases; http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1057740802702325
18 Krznaric 2011, 130.
19 http://www.statista.com/topics/846/amazon/; http://uk.businessinsider.com/new-cirp-amazon-prime-numbers-2016-1?utm_source=feedly&utm_medium=webfeeds?r=US&IR=T
20 Katz 1994, 199.
21 Center for Applied Research 1999, 1.
22 Katz 1994, 146; Coombs 2014, 257–258; Lucas 2000, 149–164; Arsenault and Fawzy 2001, 63–76; Helstein 2003, 276–292; Penaloza 1998, 337–400.
23 Katz 1994, 39.
24 Kim and Short 2008, 43.
25 Berger 1972, 131; Ewen 1996, 3–4, 131–145.
26 Berger 1972, 131.
27 http://www.monbiot.com/2014/01/20/addicted-to-comfort/
28 Around 66% of people over the age of 16 in the UK list shopping as one of their favoured leisure activities; this is a higher percentage than for alternative activities such as reading, gardening or sport. http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/social-trends-rd/social-trends/social-trends-40/social-trends-40---lifestyles-and-social-participation-chapter.pdf. Some surveys reveal that UK adults spend 2.5 hours per week on window shopping and browsing (with a further two hours per week on essential grocery shopping). See http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2295244/Brits-spend-18-days-year-shopping.html. US data shows average time spent shopping daily is around 45 minutes, with women spending more time than men. See http://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/atus_06242016.pdf. Time spent shopping on smartphones in the US almost doubled from 2013 to 2015. See http://uk.businessinsider.com/five-must-know-retail-trends-in-mobile-and-social-marketing-2016-4-24.
29 Adorno and Horkheimer 1997, 123.
30 Packard 1960, 11–17.
31 Many of the pleasures of television – both individual and collective – are explored in Moran (2013).
32 Average television watching time in the UK on a regular TV set is 3 hours and 40 minutes. See http://media.ofcom.org.uk/news/2015/cmr-uk-2015/, and https://www.thinkbox.tv/News-and-opinion/Newsroom/10032016-New-figures-put-TV-viewing-in-perspective. The latest US government data shows daily average TV time for people over 15 was 2.78 hours, out of a total 5.21 hours of leisure time. The figure for television time may well be an underestimate, as it excludes watching programmes on devices such as phones and tablets. See http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/atus.pdf. Many studies give a higher figure for hours of TV watched, in both the US and European countries. See, for example, http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/reports/2016/the-total-audience-report-q4-2015.html. See also http://www.economist.com/node/15980817 and Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi (2003, 50).
33 Based on total daily electronic media exposure of 9 hours and 51 minutes. See Nielson (2016, 16), http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/reports/2016/the-total-audience-report-q4-2015.html
34 Kaiser Family Foundation 2010, 3.
35 Mander 1978, 24.
36 Debord 2010, 2; Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi 1990, 185.
37 Moran 2013, 3.
38 Based on an Italian study of over 500 couples: http://serenellasalomoni.com/2014/10/22/la-televisione-in-camera-spegne-la-libido/
39 Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi 2003, 53; Owen et al 2010, 4.
40 Orlowski 2007, 6.
41 http://www.commercialfreechildhood.org/sites/default/files/kidsandscreens_0.pdf
42 Veerman et al 2011, 1.
43 Dunstan et al 2010, 5; Paddock 2010, 1–4; Owen et al 2010, 105–113; http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/too-much-sitting-linked-to-an-early-death-201401297004.
44 Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi 2003, 48–55; Baumeister and Tierney 2012, 4.
45 Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi 2003, 48–55; Crawford 2015, 8–10.
46 Bourdieu 1998, 7.
47 Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi 1990, 196, 200.
48 Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi 1990, 190–191, 213–214.
49 See, for instance, Rosenthal (2005, ix), Schwartz (2005, 2) and Greenfield (2012, 27).
4
The Art of Seizing Opportunities
Remember Bernard Jordan, the intrepid eighty-nine-year-old navy veteran who broke out of his care home to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the D-Day landings? His daring escape to the beaches of Normandy was the perfect carpe diem crime. It also represented a very specific type of seizing the day: grasping a momentary window of opportunity that may pass and be lost forever. Since the eighteenth century, this has been the dominant meaning of carpe diem in popular culture, and far more common than alternatives like the pursuit of hedonistic pleasures or the ambition to live in the present moment.1 Our language is now peppered with expressions that urge us to take the fleeting chances that life offers, from ‘seize the opportunity’ and ‘opportunity knocks’
to ‘window of opportunity’ and ‘lost opportunity’.
Appropriately enough, given Bernard’s seafaring background, the word ‘opportunity’ itself has maritime origins. It comes from the Latin phrase ob portum veniens, meaning ‘coming toward a port’, and referred to a favourable wind that would blow a ship into harbour. So we can think of an opportunity as a good wind blowing to our advantage. We are in the right place at the right time. The question is whether we are going to hoist our sails, point them in the appropriate direction and catch this propitious wind. And can we overcome our fear that in doing so we may not be brought safely into port, but dashed upon the rocks?
If we wanted a name for a person intent on taking opportunities and jumping at the now-or-never, the obvious contender would be ‘opportunist’. Yet this is a term overlaid with negative connotations, typically referring to someone who takes advantage of situations – and of other people – for their own egoistic ends. It originally emerged from nineteenth-century Italian politics and the idea of opportunismo, where an opportunist was someone who was willing to give up their principles in the interest of political expediency.
It is curious that we don’t have more positive, or at least neutral, terms to describe those whose lives are strongly driven by a carpe diem mentality of seizing opportunities, so in this chapter I will introduce six character types that capture some of the important ways that people do so. Alongside the self-seeking opportunist there is the experimentalist, the death gazer, the daredevil, the role breaker and the revolutionary. Each has their own motivations, worldviews and strategies. What they share is a talent for making choices – not the trivial choices we make at department store sales, but the more substantive decisions that provide existential sustenance and have the potential to take our lives in new directions. They are at the forefront of challenging the hijack of carpe diem by forces such as consumer culture. Through the choices they make, they set their sights on adventurous sailing that, though full of dangers, may blow them into unknown and even exotic harbours.
HOW TO WING IT AS A NIGHTCLUB DANCER
If there was a single thread running through the life of Maya Angelou it was her carpe diem approach to living. In her later years Angelou was best known as a writer and poet – a distinguished African-American woman-of-letters with over fifty honorary degrees. But by the age of forty, as she revealed in her seven volumes of autobiography, she had already had an astonishing range of jobs, including short-order cook, waitress, prostitute, madam (running a lesbian whorehouse, aged just eighteen), tram attendant, nightclub singer and dancer, actress, theatre director, political organiser for Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, journalist and newspaper editor in Egypt and Ghana, and TV script writer.
Maya Angelou, 1957. Amongst her many carpe diem careers was inventing herself as a nightclub dancer.
She lived with passion and verve, not only pursuing a huge array of careers, but constantly moving to new cities and countries, throwing herself into politics and love affairs, drinking plenty of whisky, and generally daring greatly until her death in 2014, aged eighty-six. ‘Life loves the liver of it,’ was her great mantra, which was not just about recognising windows of opportunity, but making a courageous effort to open those windows and walk right through them.2 She was an ‘experimentalist’, someone who viewed life as a smorgasbord of possibilities and experiences there for the tasting, even when it involved risk and the prospect of failure.
Angelou elevated seizing opportunities into an art form. On seeing an advertisement for a Creole cook paying $75 a week, she waltzed in and announced she was an expert Creole chef despite having no experience whatsoever. When she chanced upon a man looking for someone to join his dance act, she pretended to have a professional dancing pedigree in order to land the job. Determined to make a career in showbiz, she heard about an opening as a singer at a San Francisco nightclub, and invented herself as a Cuban Calypso singer, having only ever sung in her church choir as a young girl (and she wasn’t Cuban either).3 Over and over again, Angelou took her chances and plunged herself into new jobs and experiences with a bravado that few of us possess.
A century of sociological research tells us that opportunity and privilege go hand in hand. There are relatively few opportunities – especially in the world of work – for those living on the social margins compared to people with financial means, expensive educations and good social connections. True enough: get yourself a degree from Harvard or Oxford and doors will open, especially if you are white and male. But Angelou’s story adds nuance, revealing how even in conditions of poverty and adversity it can be possible to develop a carpe diem approach to living founded on seizing opportunities. Especially in her early life, she took opportunities as a matter of utter necessity rather than choice. Having grown up in a small town in Arkansas surrounded by everyday racism and prejudice, at the age of seventeen she found herself as a single mother with a child and having to make a living. So from that early age she grabbed every opportunity that came her way. ‘The birth of my son,’ she recalled, ‘caused me to develop the courage to invent my life.’4 As time went on, Angelou realised that her carpe diem outlook, originally motivated by the need to make ends meet, was actually giving her an incredibly vibrant existence. She came to cherish the freedom and excitement it offered, especially after getting married for the first time and discovering her distaste for domesticity. ‘My life began to resemble a Good Housekeeping advertisement,’ Angelou lamented.5 She soon got out of it.
Yet for all the freedom she enjoyed, seizing opportunities did not come without costs. At the age of twenty-six, Angelou was suddenly offered a dream job to tour Europe as a dancer in a production of Porgy and Bess. With only four days’ notice, she followed the call of carpe diem and left the United States, venturing abroad for a year. But to do so, she also had to leave behind her nine-year-old son to live with his grandmother. Her son was psychologically scarred by this enforced separation, which left Angelou consumed by guilt. Throughout his childhood he had to face the insecurities of his mother’s freewheeling life that resulted in him attending nineteen different schools over a period of eleven years.6 It is a reminder that seizing the day can be accompanied by serious collateral damage, not just for the person doing the seizing, but for the people who are touched by their decisions. Every choice comes with an inescapable responsibility.
There is no doubt that Maya Angelou had extraordinary courage and confidence, but she was quick to point out that most people have a capacity for daring once they recognise that the skills required for almost any career or activity can be learned on the job through determination and application. When offered a position as a newspaper editor in Cairo, she learned from others how to pen opinion pieces. Similarly, when asked to write a ten-part TV documentary on African-American culture, she took it on, believing that she could teach herself to write film scripts from books. ‘With time and a kindly librarian, any unskilled person can learn how to build a replica of the Taj Mahal,’ she wrote.7 It’s an inspiring idea, though one which surely risks having the building crumble around us.
There was, however, another secret to her carpe diem courage: Angelou became an expert at ‘winging it’ – a term that originally referred to actors who played a role without fully knowing their lines and received prompts from the wings of the stage.8 She was regularly out of her depth and bluffing her way through her many roles. Sometimes she failed and fell flat on her face, but mostly she didn’t and managed to make a success of her endeavours. There is good evidence that many more people are actually winging it in their jobs than we realise, from politicians and business professionals to civil servants and journalists.9 While there are plenty of genuine experts around, there are just as many people who are secretly improvising and operating on the very edge of competence. This can be a frightening thought, but also a potentially liberating one. We might all join the ranks of those who are just winging it, and release more of our experimentalist side on the world.
THE
WOMAN WITH THE CARPE DIEM TATTOO
Anyone who sees the 1971 cult film Harold and Maude would want to spend at least one day of their life with Maude. While Harold is a morbid, lost, wealthy young man struggling to find meaning in his existence, Maude is a free-spirited seventy-nine-year-old who lives with passionate abandon. She breaks into pet shops and liberates the canaries. She steals people’s cars and drives them recklessly to beautiful hilltops where she frolics in the sunshine. She works as a nude model. She goes on the most hair-raising rides at the amusement park. She lives in a cluttered old railway car that looks like a pawn shop, full of banjos, flowers, sculptures, a portrait of herself making love with a swan, and an olfactory machine that pumps out the smell of snow in New York City.
They meet while engaged in a favourite pastime they share: attending the funerals of strangers. Maude’s vivacious and extrovert approach to life blows Harold’s introspective, self-obsessed world apart. ‘I’m always looking for the new experience,’ says Maude. ‘Try something new each day. After all, we’re given life to find it out. It doesn’t last forever’.10 Harold becomes infected by her lust for living. Together they kidnap a small tree dying of city smog and drive it – chased by the police – to a lush forest, where they replant it and give it new life in a gesture that serves as a metaphor for the film itself. As they fall in love – defying their six-decade age gap – they sing Cat Stevens’s carpe diem anthem, ‘If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out’.
Where does Maude’s extraordinary appetite for life come from? It remains a mystery for most of the film, but toward the end her secret is revealed. Some people miss it on first viewing. The couple are watching a sublime sunset together. Harold reaches down to take Maude’s hand and for the briefest instant he sees a number tattooed on her arm: P-876854. It may be the most subtle yet powerful Holocaust moment in film history. Maude is a survivor of the death camps.
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