During a rainy vacation day last summer, I watched my six-year-old son playing a game on my iPad.

He was stuck on the first level for what seemed like an eternity. Hoping to help, I tried to offer some suggestions, but he immediately turned me down. I eventually realized that he didn’t care how many times he failed that level. He was going to try everything he could until he succeeded.
For him, it was a puzzle — not a problem. In business, we could learn a few things from that type of determination to succeed.

Children are creative, ambitious and fearless — which sounds like the makings of a perfect entrepreneur, right? So, if we want to encourage innovation in business, we need to follow that example. There are several qualities kids have that many adults have lost along the way.

1. They don’t worry about failure

When a child takes on a challenge, the thought of failure doesn’t even cross her mind. It’s not that she thinks she’ll succeed immediately; it’s that she knows she has to try different things to succeed. She also isn’t afraid of what other people might think. Kids have more self-confidence than self-consciousness.

We all understand the importance of trial and error in moving our ideas, businesses and lives forward, but as we transition into adulthood, we lose our willingness to experiment. We lose our tolerance for failure. We become conditioned to mitigate risks to preserve our wealth and egos, particularly when our financial futures are dependent upon the success of our self-run businesses and ventures.

The older we get, the more comfortable we become with our lives. It becomes more and more difficult for us to manage our own risk-versus-reward equation.

2. They appreciate the process

Kids don’t expect to know everything. Their minds are open, and they want to learn – failure is simply another method through which they gather information.

3. They recover quickly

If you watch a child lose a sport or game, you will likely see a small volcanic eruption. There’s no burst of frustration quite like that of a child, but kids also move quickly to the next challenge. As adults, we’ve learned to control ourselves better, which is good, but we often lose the ability to move on. It’s understandable that after months or years of working on a product or service, a person would be emotionally invested and would struggle to see past that one goal.

But without seeing through a wider lens, failures hold us back — often yielding more failures.

So, foster an environment that accepts failure

There’s a lot of buzz in business publications suggesting that innovation is dead. I believe it’s far from dead, but our fear of failure is paralyzing us. In order to foster innovation, we need to be able to experiment. There are many ways small business owners can promote a tolerance of risk-taking and failure.

1. Hire risk-takers: During interviews, ask qualified candidates to share their experiences with professional failure. What did they accomplish? What did they learn? What would they do differently? This is a great way to quickly assess an individual’s comfort level with failure and establish it as part of your organization’s culture.

2. Retention policies: In one organization I worked with, employees whose projects had failed were given 60 days to find a new position within the organization, rather than being immediately cut loose. Another option is transitioning employees to positions where they can jump into new innovation projects. Policies like these take away a major fear that comes with risk-taking, and they encourage employees to be more adventurous.

3. Address risk-taking and failure: Ensure that employees and managers are communicating about risks and failures. One CEO I worked with added a section to his company’s annual review process in which employees captured their failures and discussed them with their managers. This is a great way to lead employees beyond their failures and on to more successes. You can also see if employees have escaped failure, which often means they’re being too cautious.

4. Demonstrate transparency: No organization is flawless, and sharing the mistakes a company makes with its workforce establishes the expectation that all employees, from the top down, share failures. Not only does this communicate that failure is valued as part of a learning process, but it also offsets the cost of failure by sharing lessons learned.

No matter how much we try to avoid failure, it will happen one way or another. You can make the most of it and use it to your advantage, or you can let it block progress.

My son finally did solve that level of the game – and many more after it. If your company and employees can learn to fail like children, who knows what level you will reach.

Matt Hunt is the founder of Stanford and Griggs, LLC in Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota. Hunt is also an author, speaker and consultant.

And no, it’s not about going to bed earlier… although that helps. At the core of being able to get up early in the morning and actually connect before you have your first cup of coffee is the desire to be awake. Have you ever been so excited about the events of the previous day that you had no problems waking up before your alarm and feeling fresh and alert despite being short of sleep?  Basically, being excited about life is what makes your brain switch on faster after a long time of idleness, having something to look forward to is what does it.

Getting a great job to look forward to every single day is probably a dream of every and each one of us but, in reality, a job is a job. The majority of us have jobs we definitely do not look  forward to so the treasured sleep is something we don’t want to end prematurely, not even five minutes before we absolutely have to. There are other ways to get that spark and the extra time in the beginning of your day, though, like starting a routine that will get you excited and make you want to get up. Going for an early morning run or playing a game before work can be that routine, for example. It’s up to you what this exciting activity will be but it has to be something you really enjoy and want to do.

Even if you are an owl and go to bed late it’ll still work – you’ll be cutting back on sleep and reclaiming the most and the best time for living.

Why start your day earlier than you have to? Because that’s life – having time for yourself and things you enjoy doing apart from work, chores and other responsibilities that tend to just pile up on top of you throughout the entire day/week/year. If you haven’t got the time to do things you love – make time, cut back on things you can cut back on. Starting a day doing something you truly enjoy is starting your day on a high and being more satisfied with yourself by the end of it even if short of sleep.

Some people can sleep over eight hours a day and still feel tired. This well may be the disconnect of the brain from the reality you live in. If you make your life exciting enough there will be no time or need for that much sleep.

You’ll want to be awake for the life you design for yourself. You might be short of sleep but you’ll surely feel more alive, more with it and more satisfied with your life overall.

This is Daniel Ratai of Leonar3do International, who invented Leonardo device that allows 3D modelers to easily create 3D models. Hailing from Hungary, this young fella shows how making a 3D modeling does not have to be an arduous task.
For more info, check out www.leonar3do.com

This is Maxim Lobovsky, one of the co-founders of Formlabs, which launched their 3D printer on Kickstarter.com. Their approach to printing 3D objects is stereo-lithography, which yield much smoother surface on objects printed than any other competing technology in the desktop 3D printing.

This is Bre Pettis of MakerBot, talking about desktop home 3D printing.

Mcor Technologies, an Irish company came out with a 3D printer called Mcor IRIS that prints full-color 3D objects using ordinary office paper. While not affordable to home 3D modeler/maker, this 3D printer would most likely be useful to architects or wealthy artists.

Here is Darryl of GoMeasure3D, talking about their 3D scanners to scan objects in order to bring into 3D software to be able to change them in any way possible before exporting them to 3D printing or even to 3D animation software for making 3D cartoons.

Here is Bruce of StrataSys talking about their professional-grade 12-micron layer-thickness 3D print capable printers.

Meet Todd, who has been a 3D printing evangelist since the early 2000′s. In this video he’s talking about the exciting tech times we are living in, as well as what to expect from 3D printing in the near future. You can learn more about Todd’s 3D creations on www.custom3dstuff.com

courtesy zdziarski.com

Many governments (including our own, here in the US) would have its citizens believe that privacy is a switch (that is, you either reasonably expect it, or you don’t). This has been demonstrated in many legal tests, and abused in many circumstances ranging from spying on electronic mail, to drones in our airspace monitoring the movements of private citizens. But privacy doesn’t work like a switch – at least it shouldn’t for a country that recognizes that privacy is an inherent right. In fact, privacy, like other components to security, works in layers. While the legal system might have us believe that privacy is switched off the moment we step outside, the intent of our Constitution’s Fourth Amendment (and our basic right, with or without it hard-coded into the Constitution) suggest otherwise; in fact, the Fourth Amendment was designed in part to protect the citizen in public. If our society can be convinced that privacy is a switch, however, then a government can make the case for flipping off that switch in any circumstance they want. Because no-one can ever practice perfect security, it’s easier for a government to simply draw a line at our front door. The right to privacy in public is one that is being very quickly stripped from our society by politicians and lawyers. Our current legal process for dealing with privacy misses one core component which adds dimension to privacy, and that is scope. Scope of privacy is present in many forms of logic that we naturally express as humans. Everything from computer programs to our natural technique for conveying third grade secrets (by cupping our hands over our mouth) demonstrates that we have a natural expectation of scope in privacy.

Layered privacy, or rather scope of privacy, is all about how far reaching one’s expectation of privacy is; better said: to whom is the conversation privileged? For example, having a private conversation with my wife in the bedroom, with the door closed clearly comes with an expectation of privacy. If I have kids in my house, however, and I open the bedroom door, any parent would tell you that I don’t have any expectation of privacy anymore: anything my wife or I say is very likely to be overheard, and possibly even used against us by our own children. At the same time, however, even the government wouldn’t make the argument that simply opening the bedroom door breaks my expectation of privacy to the degree that would justify unwarranted domestic surveillance. If my kids eavesdrop, they’re the ones in trouble. So, even within the confines of our own castle, it’s very obvious to see that privacy has layers: it has scope. If privacy has layers inside our homes, and in our very nature we exercise scope of privacy, then certainly we have (or should have) layered privacy outside of the home. If you doubt layered privacy exists, consider that you can’t even make for a discussion about privacy in this instance without answering a very important question: from whom? The scope of my kids, my neighbors, or the scope of an eavesdropping government?

Scope of privacy follows us outside of the home as well. Most people have the general mindset (whether they realize it or not) that the scope of one’s privacy is typically limited to one’s communications channel within the area, based on their visual assessment. If I am in the middle of the desert, having a quiet conversation with the only other person there, a reasonable scope of privacy for most Americans would be that my conversation will only be heard by the person I am speaking with. Reasonable privacy expectations do not permit for a hidden microphone to be planted in the cactus next to me, a drone flying overhead watching my every move, or other outrageous or covert violations of my privacy that the average person is unable to detect with the naked eye. It sounds outrageous, but put this into a real life scenario, where a man confesses to a victim’s gravestone at an empty cemetery, where law enforcement planted a hidden microphone. Did the man have an expectation of privacy? Clearly, he had some semblance of it (yet the government didn’t think so). The man had a reasonable expectation that only those within earshot (namely, the deceased) would hear him. Our current system of thinking allows for the government to “switch off” one’s expectation of privacy for nearly any reason in public, however this line of thinking is flawed. Whether a person realizes it or not, they’re exercising some form of privacy in public.

Take this one step further; if I am in a park having a private conversation with someone, it is most individuals’ mindset that their privacy will be limited to those people who are within earshot – it is a reasonable expectation that any “leakage” of my privacy will be confined to the immediate “airspace”, based on human hearing. For example, if I see my nosy neighbor come by, I know that my expectation of privacy is diminished because they’ll likely gossip it around. Most people will only allow their voice to carry far enough to reach the intended recipient, in order to create what you could call a “privileged channel” of communication. Audio (or video) enhancement is not within most people’s ability to detect with the naked eye, and therefore they’re unable to assess their surroundings to account for this in choosing the method they use for establishing this privileged channel of communication. Notice I didn’t say “secure” channel here; as humans, we’re flawed and cannot ever create a perfectly secure channel – we can’t even do that with technology half the time. I said “privileged” for a reason; it is an attempt to create a private channel, usually using the only facilities available to a person: speaking softly, based on the surroundings. It is therefore only reasonable that a person having such a conversation would expect privacy only up to the level that their voice can carry as heard by the human ear. If you wanted to compare this to how technology works, this is equivalent to having a private conversation with someone across the Internet, believing that the conversation isn’t susceptible to a man-in-the-middle attack, and is otherwise secure. If you suspected that your conversation would be compromised, you never would have engaged in that conversation to begin with – therefore, the fact that you are even having a conversation is proof that you have an expectation of privacy. This presents a very important concept: privacy and security are two very different things. If someone breaches your security, that doesn’t invalidate your right to privacy.

Privacy in pubic is now being destroyed to the point to include any activity you conduct over the Internet, whether it’s been technically designed to be private or not. The IRS has recently come under fire for spying on Americans’ email under the guise that using email surrenders one’s expectation of privacy. Anyone who understands how email works knows that its design intent, when working properly, keeps email private: it partitions off one’s email from any other users on the network, and on the server. It’s inherently private, unless of course a hacker breaks into the system and steals your privacy. Simply because email exists in a public environment doesn’t invalidate one’s expectation of privacy. Consider a single-room bathroom inside a public department store or restaurant. It is surrounded by the public, however our law still protects the inside of those four walls as a private place. Just because a criminal could potentially kick in the door and snap a photo of you on the toilet doesn’t suddenly remove your right to privacy inside this room, yet the same argument is being made against electronic mail and other forms of otherwise private communication.

A reasonable expectation of privacy, as it pertains to human nature, isn’t about geographical space, nor is it about whether the government has the ability to “hack into” your privacy. The government has no right to say that, “because we can spy on you in a public bathroom, you have no right to privacy”. Reasonable expectation of privacy is about intent to have a privileged channel of communication. Simply leaving one’s home does not surrender one’s right to privacy under our Fourth Amendment. Privacy, as it pertains to human nature, is – in its rawest form – based on a desire to have a private conversation. This is exercised in one’s assessment of surroundings, and controlled transmission (e.g. how far your voice travels) in the area, based on realistic expectations assessed visually.

A better legal test for privacy is this: did the individual attempt to create a private, privileged channel of communication with the intended recipient? We already use this test in the digital world. If your computer has a password on it, you’ve established a privileged system and expectation of privacy. It doesn’t matter how strong your password is (just like it shouldn’t matter how strong your ability to keep your conversation from being overheard is); since everything is fallible (even technology), if you attempted to protect your privacy in any way, you should be considered to have an expectation of privacy. In verbal communication, this translates to simply speaking at a level consistent with directed communication. The security of your communication is as irrelevant as the strength of your password. Did the person attempt to have a privileged communication with someone else (regardless of whether they were in public or not)?

It’s not hard to see the can of worms this opens for lawyers, which is precisely why lawyers have attempted to flip our privacy rights on their head, and somehow suggest that we have no right to privacy whatsoever, unless we prove otherwise. But in reality, our right to privacy should be guaranteed unless we take reckless steps to surrender it. Attempting to make the argument that audio or visual enhancements from microphones, cameras, drones, or the like, should compromise this is essentially making the argument that “because the government can spy on you, they have a right to”.

People should be consciously thinking about privacy in terms of layers, instead of allowing the government to do the thinking for them. The landscape has shifted dramatically in today’s world with regards to privacy; this is largely in part the result of politicians, rather than society. When politicians and lawyers begin to control how we as a society view privacy, it can only lead down the road to an inevitable totalitarian government, with a surveillance, nanny state stop on the way. The privacy of American citizens was so cherished, and is so critical to a free country, that the framers of our Constitution made it an exclusive item in our Bill of Rights. No more could we survive as a country without privacy as we could without free speech, or the right to keep and bear arms, to protect ourselves from an overstepping government. Privacy was never meant to be taken for granted, and was never meant to be stripped from Americans.

Price? The handle/app combo could easily be sold for $1500

The second version of this product includes optical lens attachment with optical zoom. Also, multi-cam capability where record/pause can be swapped between host phone and the child one using personal Wi-Fi connectivity between them.

What are your thoughts on this concept?

Will is a Michigan-born artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He was interviewed at Mike Weiss gallery at his one-man-show openning called “Another Shit Show” on March 21, 2013.

Another Sh*t Show, the second solo exhibition by Brooklyn-based artist Will Kurtz at the Mike Weiss Gallery . Using the empty gallery as a site on which to stage operatic, all-encompassing mise-en-scene, Kurtz makes an ambitious, multi-part figure installation that throws the facade off human nature – albeit in canine terms. Constructed of unlikely materials such as newspaper, glue, wire and wood, more than 20 dogs of every breed, size and color, strain and cavort off the leash of a single human handler, each rendered more expressively than the next.

Kurtz, a master of anatomy, achieves an utterly believable aesthetic by building up layer upon layer of yesterday’s news, held together by exposed grommets and endless amounts of masking tape. In his 2012 exhibition Extra F*cking Ordinary, Kurtz proved his uncanny facility for depicting everyday New Yorkers with an irreverent yet impressive attention to detail and body language, as well subtle cultural nuances – a visual marriage of the likes of Duane Hanson, George Segal, and Red Grooms.

Here, the artist continues to work perfectly to scale, from the tiny, mischievous Min-Pin Dre to the mammoth Bull Mastiffs, Lefty and Cooper. Intentionally leaving large headlines and slogans clearly visible, each anthropomorphic beast becomes both time capsule and social commentator. Lemar, the stout, snaggle-toothed English Bulldog bears a New York Times review of Patti Smith, weaving his own mini-narrative out of Arts & Culture snippets. Theo the brindle-pied pit bears the poignant fragments of a beloved athletic icon’s obituary, while Linda the dog handler sports a vibrant pastiche of political exposés and gendered comic clippings. Ultimately, such intuitive, non-linear connections feel spot on: we’re all the product of the same schizophrenic urban culture; free-ranging pieces of a social fabric we all share.
And sometimes, we need to claim our territory, take our desires — and grievances — for a ‘walk’.

Will Kurtz received his MFA from the New York Academy of Art where he was the recipient of the Postgraduate Fellowship, 2009 – 2010. His work is currently in the Eileen S. Kaminsky Family Foundation, Jersey City; Tullman Collection, Chicago; Krupp Family Foundation, Boston and the Collection Majuda, Montreal. Kurtz was born in Michigan and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Ariely describes these experiments and the results in a new book, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie To Everyone — Especially Ourselves. He talks with NPR’s Robert Siegel about how society’s troubles aren’t always caused by the really bad apples; they’re caused by the scores of slightly rotting apples who are cheating just a little bit.

Here is the audio interview;

 

Interview Highlights

On the traditional, cost/benefit theory of dishonesty

“The standard view is a cost/benefit view. It says that every time we see something, we ask ourselves: What do I stand to gain from this and what do I stand to lose? Imagine it’s a gas station: Going by a gas station, you ask yourself: How much money is in this gas station? If I steal it, what’s the chance that somebody will catch me and how much time will I have in prison? And you basically look at the cost and benefit, and if it’s a good deal, you go for it.”

On why the cost/benefit theory is flawed

“It’s inaccurate, first of all. When we do experiments, when we try to tempt people to cheat, we don’t find that these three elements — what do we stand to gain, probability of being caught and size of punishment — end up describing much of the result.

“Not only is it a bad descriptor of human behavior, it’s also a bad input for policy. Think about it: When we try to curb dishonesty in the world, what do we do? We get more police force, we increase punishment in prison. If those are not the things that people consider when they think about committing a particular crime, then all of these efforts are going to be wasted.”

On how small-time cheaters still perceive themselves as good people

“We want to view ourselves as honest, wonderful people and when we cheat … as long as we cheat just a little bit, we can still view ourselves as good people, but once we start cheating too much … we can’t view ourselves as good people and therefore we stop. So this model of trying to balance the ability to view ourselves as good people on one hand and the ability to cheat on the other hand predicts that people will cheat a little bit and they will still feel good about themselves. … That’s what we see across many, many experiments.”

On how only a few people cheat a lot, but a lot of people cheat a little

“Across all of our experiments, we’ve tested maybe 30,000 people, and we had a dozen or so bad apples and they stole about $150 from us. And we had about 18,000 little rotten apples, each of them just stole a couple of dollars, but together it was $36,000. And if you think about it, I think it’s actually a good reflection of what happens in society.”

On his favorite cheating experiment

“We give people a sheet of paper with 20 simple math problems and we say, ‘You have 5 minutes to solve as many of those as you can, and we’ll give you $1 per question.’ We say, ‘Go!’ People start, they solve as many as they can, at the end of the five minutes, we say, ‘Stop! Please count how many questions you got correctly, and now that you know how many questions you got correctly, go to the back of the room and shred this piece of paper. And once you’ve finished shredding this piece of paper, come to the front of the room and tell me how many questions you got correctly.’

“Well, people do this, they shred, they come back, and they say they solved on average six problems, we pay them $6, they go home. What the people in the experiment don’t know is that we’ve played with the shredder, and so the shredder only shreds the sides of the page but the main body of the page remains intact. … What we find is people basically solve four and report six. … We find that lots of people cheat a little bit; very, very few people cheat a lot.

On a variation of this experiment in which participants cheated twice as much

“In one of the experiments, people did the same thing exactly, finished shredding the piece of paper, but when they came to report, they didn’t say, ‘Mr. Experimenter, I solved x problems, give me x dollars.’ They say, ‘Mr. Experimenter, I solved x problems, give me x tokens,’ and we paid people with pieces of plastic in terms of money. And then they took these pieces of plastic and they walk 12 feet to the side and exchanged them for dollars. … The only difference is when people stared somebody else in the eyes and lied, they lied for pieces of plastic and not money. And what happened? Our participants doubled their cheating.”

On how our cashless economy may encourage cheaters

“The moment something is one step removed from money … people can cheat more and [still] feel good about themselves. It basically relieves people from the moral shackles. And, the reason this worries me so much is because if you think about modern society, we are creating lots of cashless economy. We have electronic wallets, we have mortgage-backed securities, we have stock options, and could it be that all of those payment modalities that as they get more and more further from money become easier for us to cheat and be dishonest with them.”

On one version of the experiment, in which the administrator of the test takes a cell phone call while he’s giving instructions to the participants, which causes the participants to cheat even more

“I think this goes back to the law of karma, right? So if you ask yourself, how can I rationalize cheating, really the main mechanism in all of our experiments is rationalization. How can you rationalize your actions and still think of yourself as a good person? And if somebody has mistreated you, now you can probably rationalize something to a higher degree.”

On the dishonesty that arises from conflicts of interest

“We need to change … regulation, and it’s basically to change conflicts of interest. … Much like in sports, if you like a particular team and the referee calls against your team, you think the referee is evil, vicious, stupid. … In the same way, if you have a financial stake in seeing the world in a certain way, you’re going to see the world in a certain way. So the first thing I think we need to do is eradicate conflicts of interest.”

On the Broken Windows theory of policing — cracking down on minor offenses in an effort to curb major offenses

“There’s kind of two ways to think about the Broken Windows theory: one is about cost/benefit analysis and do people do it; the other one is about what … society around us tells us is acceptable and not acceptable. I actually believe in the second approach for this. So when we go around the world and we ask ourselves what behavior are we willing to engage in/what behavior we’re not, we look at other people for a gauge for what is acceptable. In our experiments, we’ve shown that if we get one person to cheat in an egregious way and other people see them, they start cheating to a higher degree. So, for me, the broken window theory is more as a social signal than fear of being caught.”

Well I’m in the working world again. I’ve found myself a well-paying gig in the engineering industry, and life finally feels like it’s returning to normal after my nine months of traveling.

Because I had been living quite a different lifestyle while I was away, this sudden transition to 9-to-5 existence has exposed something about it that I overlooked before.

Since the moment I was offered the job, I’ve been markedly more careless with my money. Not stupid, just a little quick to pull out my wallet. As a small example, I’m buying expensive coffees again, even though they aren’t nearly as good as New Zealand’s exceptional flat whites, and I don’t get to savor the experience of drinking them on a sunny café patio. When I was away these purchases were less off-handed, and I enjoyed them more.

I’m not talking about big, extravagant purchases. I’m talking about small-scale, casual, promiscuous spending on stuff that doesn’t really add a whole lot to my life. And I won’t actually get paid for another two weeks.

In hindsight I think I’ve always done this when I’ve been well-employed — spending happily during the “flush times.” Having spent nine months living a no-income backpacking lifestyle, I can’t help but be a little more aware of this phenomenon as it happens.

I suppose I do it because I feel I’ve regained a certain stature, now that I am again an amply-paid professional, which seems to entitle me to a certain level of wastefulness. There is a curious feeling of power you get when you drop a couple of twenties without a trace of critical thinking. It feels good to exercise that power of the dollar when you know it will “grow back” pretty quickly anyway.

What I’m doing isn’t unusual at all. Everyone else seems to do this. In fact, I think I’ve only returned to the normal consumer mentality after having spent some time away from it.

One of the most surprising discoveries I made during my trip was that I spent much less per month traveling foreign counties (including countries more expensive than Canada) than I did as a regular working joe back home. I had much more free time, I was visiting some of the most beautiful places in the world, I was meeting new people left and right, I was calm and peaceful and otherwise having an unforgettable time, and somehow it cost me much less than my humble 9-5 lifestyle here in one of Canada’s least expensive cities.

It seems I got much more for my dollar when I was traveling. Why?

A Culture of Unnecessaries

Here in the West, a lifestyle of unnecessary spending has been deliberately cultivated and nurtured in the public by big business. Companies in all kinds of industries have a huge stake in the public’s penchant to be careless with their money. They will seek to encourage the public’s habit of casual or non-essential spending whenever they can.

In the documentary The Corporation, a marketing psychologist discussed one of the methods she used to increase sales. Her staff carried out a study on what effect the nagging of children had on their parents’ likelihood of buying a toy for them. They found out that 20% to 40% of the purchases of their toys would not have occurred if the child didn’t nag its parents. One in four visits to theme parks would not have taken place. They used these studies to market their products directly to children, encouraging them to nag their parents to buy.

This marketing campaign alone represents many millions of dollars that were spent because of demand that was completely manufactured.

“You can manipulate consumers into wanting, and therefore buying, your products. It’s a game.” ~ Lucy Hughes, co-creator of “The Nag Factor”

This is only one small example of something that has been going on for a very long time. Big companies didn’t make their millions by earnestly promoting the virtues of their products, they made it by creating a culture of hundreds of millions of people that buy way more than they need and try to chase away dissatisfaction with money.

We buy stuff to cheer ourselves up, to keep up with the Joneses, to fulfill our childhood vision of what our adulthood would be like, to broadcast our status to the world, and for a lot of other psychological reasons that have very little to do with how useful the product really is. How much stuff is in your basement or garage that you haven’t used in the past year?

The real reason for the forty-hour workweek

The ultimate tool for corporations to sustain a culture of this sort is to develop the 40-hour workweek as the normal lifestyle. Under these working conditions people have to build a life in the evenings and on weekends. This arrangement makes us naturally more inclined to spend heavily on entertainment and conveniences because our free time is so scarce.

I’ve only been back at work for a few days, but already I’m noticing that the more wholesome activities are quickly dropping out of my life: walking, exercising, reading, meditating, and extra writing.

The one conspicuous similarity between these activities is that they cost little or no money, but they take time.

Suddenly I have a lot more money and a lot less time, which means I have a lot more in common with the typical working North American than I did a few months ago. While I was abroad I wouldn’t have thought twice about spending the day wandering through a national park or reading my book on the beach for a few hours. Now that kind of stuff feels like it’s out of the question. Doing either one would take most of one of my precious weekend days!

The last thing I want to do when I get home from work is exercise. It’s also the last thing I want to do after dinner or before bed or as soon as I wake, and that’s really all the time I have on a weekday.

This seems like a problem with a simple answer: work less so I’d have more free time. I’ve already proven to myself that I can live a fulfilling lifestyle with less than I make right now. Unfortunately, this is close to impossible in my industry, and most others. You work 40-plus hours or you work zero. My clients and contractors are all firmly entrenched in the standard-workday culture, so it isn’t practical to ask them not to ask anything of me after 1 p.m., even if I could convince my employer not to.

The eight-hour workday developed during the industrial revolution in Britain in the 19th century, as a respite for factory workers who were being exploited with 14- or 16-hour workdays.

As technologies and methods advanced, workers in all industries became able to produce much more value in a shorter amount of time. You’d think this would lead to shorter workdays.

But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work.

We’ve been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don’t have. We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing.

Western economies, particularly that of the United States, have been built in a very calculated manner on gratification, addiction, and unnecessary spending. We spend to cheer ourselves up, to reward ourselves, to celebrate, to fix problems, to elevate our status, and to alleviate boredom.

Can you imagine what would happen if all of America stopped buying so much unnecessary fluff that doesn’t add a lot of lasting value to our lives?

The economy would collapse and never recover.

All of America’s well-publicized problems, including obesity, depression, pollution and corruption are what it costs to create and sustain a trillion-dollar economy. For the economy to be “healthy,” America has to remain unhealthy. Healthy, happy people don’t feel like they need much they don’t already have, and that means they don’t buy a lot of junk, don’t need to be entertained as much, and they don’t end up watching a lot of commercials.

The culture of the eight-hour workday is big business’ most powerful tool for keeping people in this same dissatisfied state where the answer to every problem is to buy something.

You may have heard of Parkinson’s Law. It is often used in reference to time usage: the more time you’ve been given to do something, the more time it will take you to do it. It’s amazing how much you can get done in twenty minutes if twenty minutes is all you have. But if you have all afternoon, it would probably take way longer.

Most of us treat our money this way. The more we make, the more we spend. It’s not that we suddenly need to buy more just because we make more, only that we can, so we do. In fact, it’s quite difficult for us to avoid increasing our standard of living (or at least our rate of spending) every time we get a raise.

I don’t think it’s necessary to shun the whole ugly system and go live in the woods, pretending to be a deaf-mute, as Holden Caulfield often fantasized. But we could certainly do well to understand what big commerce really wants us to be. They’ve been working for decades to create millions of ideal consumers, and they have succeeded. Unless you’re a real anomaly, your lifestyle has already been designed.

The perfect customer is dissatisfied but hopeful, uninterested in serious personal development, highly habituated to the television, working full-time, earning a fair amount, indulging during their free time, and somehow just getting by.

Is this you?

Two weeks ago I would have said hell no, that’s not me, but if all my weeks were like this one has been, that might be wishful thinking.