Father's Day Triggers

It is Father's Day today and while I didn't get breakfast in bed, I did have breakfast made for me, which was nice. It doesn't take much to make me happy, since I am generally a pretty simple person, but I also got a gift which is pretty cool - A personalized (well, semi-personalized) book about my daughter and I.

These personalized gifts are pretty clever and the stories within were selected by my wife to to fit in with our life so far and guess at what is to come. There is enough similarity that it could have been written loosely for us and while I read a few pages of it to my daughter as a bedtime story tonight, it did evoke a lot of memories.

Personalization goes a long way to developing an engaging story and while it isn't always possible to add names and additional detail like this book has done, connecting with people's memories is a fantastic way to develop connections. This is why analogies and the familiar are so powerful as drivers for understanding and change in activity, as it engages the mind with what is known and can build a bridge to what is not.

The book made me happy. I see that this kind of personalization is going to be common in the creator economy, especially where people are more attuned to the concept of scarcity and individualized value creation. This book is kind of like a physical NFT, even though it might not have value for anyone but me.

But it wasn't the only book that came today, and the second one didn't make me happy.

This is a catalogue of toys for kids that is designed so that kids can browse through and circle what they want, which essentially directs the parents to purchase the item. Many parents love it as it means they don't have to think about what to get their kids, but we have a "No Junk Mail" sticker on our letterbox for a reason and, this is definitely junk mail. I am a little annoyed.

I have been meaning to write another post about something similar to this over the last couple days, but will get to that later. In short though, the problem with junk mail is it literally brings advertising material into our home, makes us look around at what we have and then, decide it isn't good enough and encourages (compels) us to buy more. What I have noticed is that the people who like flipping through the junk mail, tend to buy more than those who never (rarely) let it into their home.

There is the "discount" mentality that it is saving money without acknowledging that without the catalogue as a reminder, nothing would have been spent at all. It is about framing and when you read something like, "20% off!", what you should do is ask yourself, "Am I willing to pay 80% for that?" It seems like there is no difference in this as technically it is the same, but to the mind, it is quite different.

Think about it in terms of buying a token and we can use Bitcoin as an example. A lot of people believe that it is going to see 100K this year and for argument's sake, let's say you are one of them. What that means is currently, it is 35% off, yet are you willing to pay 65%? What is funny in this scenario is that this is something we expect is going to appreciate in value, whereas the stuff we are buying from these catalogues is almost entirely depreciative to zero in a very short amount of time.

Value is always subjective and when it comes to consumer items, we are very susceptible to being influenced into overvaluing what might not hold very much value at all. We spend so much of our collective wealth on incremental and largely insignificant differences, that a great many of us are unable to find anything left to invest into something that may go up in value - appreciate.

What we mentally appreciate matters, which is why I personally don't want the junk mail to enter my home, as I do not appreciate being told what I should desire. I don't want to flick through and be influenced to buy something, just because my eyes happened to see it, while a moment earlier my life was fine without it. Many think that they are far too smart to fall under such influence, yet - how many are? I suspect, not many.

It is interesting to consider though, as we know that one of the best ways to influence the actions of others is to lead by example, but we regularly fail to acknowledge that this is what advertising is. It is literally examples of what we could have.

I don't want my daughter to lose her creative mind and ability to process her experience and work out what she wants for herself, without having to be suggested what to want. There is a subtlety in this process that many seem to miss, where our entire experience is become far more "suggestion-based" through algorithms designed to drive our consumption.

This is especially influential when our real-world interaction is being increasingly limited to the digital experience and we are no longer taking in as wide a range of information to filter upon. Everyone ends up feeling like they are making their own decision based on their filtered wants, but what is actually happening is everyone is being fed the same suggestions and as a result, most are choosing the same as others. This is then reinforced through the various peer networks that "verify" decisions to make people feel that they made the right choice, because it is the same choice others made. It is the influence toward homogenization and mediocrity of result - but it is easy.

We might not like to admit it, but we make most of our decisions based on convenience, which is why habits are so hard to break. It is far easier to keep doing what we have always done under the guise of, because we have always done it is the best thing to do. We don't question where the habit came from, we don't question why it feels so natural, we just go with the program. And the program has inbuilt trigger conditions that drive our behavior.

We hear a familiar story that makes us imagine ourselves in the experience and we feel something. We imagine ourselves with a particular product, and we buy something. We have to disengage the triggers that make us behave in the ways that we want to change, and surround ourselves with triggers that encourage us to act in ways we want to move. We are all influenced by our surroundings, including what we surround ourselves with.

I like spending my time with my daughter.
She triggers me into being a better human.

Taraz [ Gen1: Hive ]