The Fax of Life?

In comments to a previous post about marketers as liars and finding "truth," Aleah reckons (emphasis mine):

A funny thing is, the people who talk the most about lying versus telling the truth, are often times the ones most full of bullshit... The pure answer is sometimes the stuff we say when drunk, when talking in our sleep, when a child, or when developmentally or emotionally injured. Everything else is filler.

What we SHOULD be talking about as marketers is over-consumption. In the words, what we are convincing people to buy is contributing to a giant pile of planetary garbage....

Go, Sister!

Me? I think companies have plenty of faults, but I've never been one to believe that they create "artificial" need. The universe is sublimely efficient; nothing happens without a quantum mechanical reason. In other words, if somebody's buying a "useless" product, that "useless" label is often applied by a non-consumer of said product--and it's really simply non-understanding by the non-consumer. For example, I don't buy Dale Earnhardt stickers to slap on my car because they don't mean anything to me. He doesn't mean anything of note to me. (Mansell or Schumacher? Different story.) But he does to lots of people. So that product has its place in the grand continuum.

Aleah brings up a good point, but is it it the whole point? I thought not and said so:

A la that visual of Jung's Ego with its "hole" or void that we sense we need to fill, many view "stuff" as being the answer. "Stuff" is easier than self-awareness, quicker too, albeit ultimately a dud. But that's not the *fault* of companies, it is just human nature and has been for eons before the Dow Jones or Ad Age.

Now, if someone wants to tackle the third rail of poor parental teaching and uncourageous, therefore, dishonest cultural/political/religious leadership and their effect of generating those nascent consumer/voids called children-cum-selfish-grown-ups, well, I'd say that would be closer to the mark. But that's just me.

Hmmm. Poor prep of seed material. Lack of contextual understanding or interior knowledge. Unsatisfying answers resulting from misperception of the challenge or misunderstanding the question.

Don at Leadership Now has a piece called Coddlers tackling this very thing, but in the workplace itself...

Old fogies have always complained about “kids these days.” But even fairly young and hip managers are increasingly echoing such laments. The complaint from managers of all ages in all walks of life that I’m hearing on an almost daily basis: Many young people entering the workforce today come with wickedly counterproductive attitudes. In particular, evil twins called Needy and Fragility show up with frightening regularity.

The managers lament goes something like this: These kids don’t want to take responsibility. They don’t want to do anything that’s hard. They want positive stroking for the littlest accomplishment, and literally cry at the slightest hint of criticism.

Sound familiar? It’s always unfair to paint a large group of people with a single sweep of a broad brush. But something is going on with the attitudes of the most youthful in the workplace. And it’s no wonder.

Talk with educators about the challenges in schools these days, and inevitably they end up pointing to the My Little Darling Syndrome. You know, as in when a teacher or administrator calls mommy or daddy to the school for a conference to discuss challenges with their little one.

The only response from adamantly defensive parents: “You are either grossly mistaken or you simply don’t understand my wonderful, flawless child.”

This has been going on for a while. And today, the effect of overly protective, over-nurturing parenting is now showing up in the workplace....

Now, if you've read this far, you must be interested in the topic. We could go in all kinds of directions from here:

1. Minimum requirements, maximal consequences. That parent with the flawless child knows the child is not flawless, but any admission of reality or culpability calls into question a succession of choices said parent has made or avoided. Bad mojo for Mommy or Daddy's preferred reality and a very unwelcome challenge to their parental effectiveness with the uncomfortable empirical support that they are sitting in front of that kid's teacher, and not to pick up an award. And they are sitting there because they, too, probably were conditioned to ask: is this gonna be on the test? Children taught or permitted to engage in learning that way are in danger of becoming adults and workers who view their world and commitments that way. Many unpleasant surprises ensue...

2. Situational non-awareness. The above penchant for bullet-pointing the world relieves us from engaging with it, from learning to feel and then trust our own assessment of dynamic situations. Our senses and instinct convey to us a spectacular ability to suss out threats and opportunities; to divine potential and often unconventional avenues of exploration. These are primarily right-brain, gestalt sensations and hard to describe inthe standardized (blandized and boilerplated?) lexicon of business and secondary education. Oddly enough, they are the root of creativity and, also, the foundation of what business and branders call sustainable competitive advantage. (Difficult to copy, counter-intuitive, first-to-market.) As we age to adult, we are implicitly or explicitly told to ignore these non-discursive abilities and stay in the "real world" of facts. But these abilities and their messages don't go away, they're just "demoted." The remaining dissonance or tug of war leads to what Thoreau called "...lives of quiet desperation." And to...

3. Speed kills. Neural connections formed by observation, info assimilation and trial and error problem solving, and the patience required to allow children the luxury of failure are all victims of our current business/economic setup. Those parents, too harried (or just immature) to more closely engage with said child are also harried at work to "just get it done." Analysis and cognition are deemed a drag on efficiency. The semblance of quality will do. Voila: Inert, nonsensical bullet point manufacture and rote testing. The facsimile of educuation and human development. Presto: the setup for future problems....

Phew. On that final note, Don's post led Christopher Bailey at Alchemy of Soulful Work to point us to Ready or Not, Here Life Comes by Dr. Mel Levine. A snippet from a fine, and fairly lengthy excerpt via MSNBC:

We are in the midst of an epidemic of work-life unreadiness because an alarming number of emerging adults are unable to find a good fit between their minds and their career directions. Like seabirds mired in an oil spill, these fledgling men and women are stuck, unable to take flight toward a suitable career. Some are crippled before they have a chance to beat their wings; others have tumbled downward in the early stages of their trajectories. Because they are not finding their way, they may feel as if they are going nowhere and have nowhere to go...

Some anxious junior staffers may have chosen their particular roads for all the wrong reasons. Some embarked upon a career odyssey without fully understanding what that journey was destined to be about. No one told them what dental school or dental practice truly entailed; or if it was explained to them, perhaps they were not ready to hear it. Other young adults find themselves bound to an occupation from which they'd like to bail out, but they feel chained to their entry positions. Perhaps the pay is good, or backtracking would be too hard and risky, or nothing else looks any better. Finally, there are those unqualified for the peculiar rigors and aches of their grown-up work. It may be that their current abilities have failed to match their present interests. You're in for some trouble if whatever you like to do most you do poorly. Some people have strengths they're not interested in exploiting and interests that bring out all their weaknesses....

In other words, you're in trouble if you don't know your Self. And who's teaching that in McWorld today? Or even encouraging it? Mommy? Daddy? Mr. Chairman? Mr. Whipple?