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Living The Dream?! sustainable living & a Great British conversation just begging to be had.

19 Thursday Mar 2015

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Austin Powers, Banter, brands, Castles, Cats Cradle, China Dream, Climate Change, Constituencies of Action, Consumerism, Dreams, Emerged Economies, faith, great British conversation, Identity, John Stuart Mill, JUCCCE, Lighter Living, love, M&S, Pay Day Loans, Peggy Liu, Pork Scracthings, Prosecco, Reimagining Prosperity, Smarter Living, Stenna Stairlifts, sustainable living, Transforming Desire, UK Dream

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Funny how some phrases just fall in to your lap. Funny how some just stick. Living the Dream is just such a phrase – a gift horse that was staring me in the mouth.

In the space of two days I had the polarities of Great British aspiration and disappointment writ simple and large on my storytelling wall. Our Great British M&S-stylie Prosecco & Pistachio lifestyle and its poor PaydayLoan & Pork-scratching cousin came gift-wrapped in one exquisitely simple phrase.

In a West London brasserie bar sat a woman, fashionably turned out, the odd fancy shopping bag at her killer-heeled feet, a glass of bubbles in front of her, txting furiously on her i-phone 6. Her friend appeared suddenly, looking a little bedraggled, but on seeing her shiny friend she brightly chirped,’ living the dream babes…look at you…bubbles and everything…’

And within days of the upbeat version wafting in front of me, its poor cousin appeared in North London, just beyond N1. I see a bloke, obviously far from rolling in it: a bag of DIY stuff in one hand, one child in the buggy, the other mid tantrum, on the phone to his partner/girlfriend/wife/babymamma. She is patently giving him an earful. Cue a friend of his walking past on the other side of the street who shouts ‘ Oi Tommy..Living the Dream then mate!?’. The beer-battered sarcasm of this banter simply inspired a meek self-deprecating shrug in the bedraggled bloke on the mobile. True.

As a phrase Living the Dream does what every great tenet, mantra or philosophy of any authenticity and substance should do – it easily and effortlessly embraces every extremity, turbulence, nuance, depth and not so subtle shade of the thing it seeks to define or describe – in this case the quality of life the person is leading at that very moment the phrase is deployed.

It allows enormous complexity to sit just behind it, knowingly, without ever having to say it. The back-stories of these two people were plain to see without having to set them out.

This was the power of the phrase for me.

To be fair I had been searching for one to wrap up a very UK ‘dream of better’ for a while.

We had searched for a conversation starter around a more sustainable lifestyle – one that started in the real everyday world.

In 2013 we ran 4 pilot workshops in London for the UK Dream project to that end – to find a more populist, scalable conversation to inspire a more enduring model of prosperity: a thriving vibrant life open to all, underwritten with sustainable truths.

We needed a new narrative: a new lexicon of better for people to use in their everyday lives. The old narrative was simply not working. Sustainability people speaking to themselves: impenetrable, arcane, complex, off-putting.

For most people the end of the month comes before the end of the world. They are more concerned with making ends meet than with how they might meet their end in some post-apocalyptic climate-induced catastrophe. The old narratives, rooted as they are in the activist roots of environmentalism simply do not chime with your average Joe and Jane.

So we had a chasm to cross. We needed a simple and very UK-centric or British hook that allowed us to start with simple everyday human-sized truths – What keeps you up at night? What gets you out of bed in the morning? What does good look like from where you’re standing?

In a search for this new narrative, we had already applied the 7 stage Dream-In-A-Box methodology (well, three of them at least) to try and shape what better might look like and scaling the everyday conversation around it.

We got as diverse a group of individuals as possible into a room to play with, pull down, interrogate and explore the traits, dimensions, idioms and aspirations of a prosperous life underwritten by sustainable truths. And we did it by first banishing the language of the circular economy, up-cycling, collaborative consumption (a co-created art installation project by 17th Century British poets surely) stewardship, materiality, EP&L, Net Positive and every other phrase on the trending circuit.

The most interesting and charming conversations were sparked around the old arts of thrift – smart shrewd living skills. A form of street smarts for aspirational living. people who know know…

The idea of Lighter Living. Lightening the burden on oneself (bills, cost, beyond ones means) and on the world in which we endeavour to thrive offered an overarching narrative hook that felt aspirational; breezy; cool.

So UK Dream identified Smarter lighter living represented a good beginning – positive – something one feels before one thinks it.

But we still had the tricky D word. Left to its own devices, Dream is a very divisive word, regardless of how you underwrite it; especially in Britain. On the up side everyone likes a dreamy something – we are happy to have the dream job, the dream holiday. But these are specific uses of the word that define a clear and tangible set of benefits and experiences.

Use the D word on a more rarified cultural and nationalistic level and the long shadow of John Stuart Mill enters the room at the faintest whisper of the word.

Dreams. A tyranny of pasteurized living. The death of individuality. An opiate under whose suffocating crop invention withers and spirit is anaesthetised. Dreams: the heartland of the indolent and fearful. The sharp corners and friction of individuality are what keep us alive. Not buttered populist platitudes for us to get fat on.

For the UK audience, Dream just invites the cynic and the heckler to rip it up; test its edges, even when you try and put it in a box.

Hence my search for the phrase that delivered the idea of a dream of better as part of life in the here-and-now; as measured in clear and tangible terms – a phrase that could happily ladder up or down; for better or worse; good or bad; funny or sad.

Cue Living The Dream?!

As soon as we place the ‘Living the Dream?!’ question at the top of our conversational ladder everything shifts – and becomes more human.

It allows us to engage with really simple scenarios to begin with – what keeps you up at night? the ‘mares big and small of every day life – What gets you out of bed in the morning? the dreamy stuff that makes life worth living.

This simple two pillar approach can be used to inspire conversations around identity, fashion, lifestyle, living, food & drink, education, energy, finances, technology, travel & transport, leisure & entertainment, white goods, furniture – anything. Easy conversational doors into complex nuanced stories.

It also means that we can reframe conversations that interweave multiple dimensions (usually only looked at or explored as single threads) and explore them as we find them – as slightly more chaotic jumbled buckets of conversation.

For example:

Love & Shopping

The old intrinsic nature of love and how we demonstrated it – through nurture, provision, protection, empowerment, support and belonging – has been hijacked by brands trying to inveigle their way into a lead position on our purse. We are more likely to make an active demonstration of love through a commercial transaction than we are through a personal one. The extrinsic demonstrable nature of the neu-love we now practice is making us live beyond our means.

So we find ourselves living in a culture that celebrates Saturday shopping in Westfield as an act of bonding and love. Families share in the pursuit of living the dream; even if it just loading love on a credit card for later. Every demonstration of love seems to come with a bar code: DISCUSS.

Faith & Banter

Faith has become more than just the repose of religion – faith and leaps of it are required in every corner: humanists take the leap of faith in humanity and its ability to prevail. Philosophers cross the chasm of the ontological between universals and particulars. Artists relentlessly leap from humanities to science to metaphysics to the primal with an absolute faith in the eventual ascension of something sublime. Even in brittle science, in the absence of an M Theory waiting to be revealed, they undertake a leap of faith of their own every day between the two quantum truths without a bridge to join them.

But in the UK, if you get too serious, watch your language, lighten up and Get over yourself. This is the nation of ‘taking the piss’, heckling, ribbing and anarchic banter. How does something so serious play out in a culture where to be serious is to be dangerous. DISCUSS.

Castles & Cat’s Cradle

Every man is an island and every Englishman’s home is his castle. Well, ‘ish’. Given the level of Great British personal debt, mortgage rates, the ascendence of the pay day loans, just to keep the ‘castle’ from falling down, the old securities of a fixed and stable life are fast disappearing. And as the castle walls shrink or crumble, splendid isolation gives way to dynamic connection and collaboration. We are stitching ourselves back together again in myriad different ways, finding new ties that bind. If 2008 smashed the family china and pulled down the gazebo and the politicians are fracking society who’s got the UHU?

In the gaps and cracks they leave behind new opportunities and alliances form. Run down regions and communities are regenerated. people find new purpose. Can a new more enlighted aspiration for a more enduring life rise with the cultural phoenix? DISCUSS

Wellness in an highly emerged society.

In exploring the Living The Dream conversation, we also realised that culturally, socially and systemically, the UK is so emerged it’s submerged. Simple and very meaningful topics so easily and directly dealt with in other cultures are in ours hidden inside a complex and codified landscape. Triggering conversations around these topics is a minefield: an assault course of social gaffes, trip wires, trap doors, raspberries and silences. So achieving just the right lightness of touch and integrity is critical.

The conversation around wellness and wellbeing is just such a conversation. It is not in the direct line of conversational fire. We speak indirectly of these things, usually as part of a different conversational thread. We are more likely to fall upon the topic of well-being through jokes about Stenna stairlifts, incontinence pants, supersize mother in laws, smoking in bed and Austin Power’s teeth than we are directly with a straight face.

Wellness is a supermarket trend supported by chemist brands – it is NOT a stitched in part of the great british psyche just yet. But we are getting there in our own sweet time.

This is very different to the China Dream where its emerging economy status means that health & well-being are absolutely central to the idea of what better looks like. A conversation that begins and ends with the need for something drastic to happen around air, water, food integrity and diet and their role in building a more resilient and dynamic society.

All in all, Living The Dream?! (for now at least) creates a simple conversational foundation for a bigger conversation around what good looks like and how we might get there individually, communally and collectively. Apply simple rules of smarter, lighter living at the heart of it and perhaps we might move the dial from over indexing on what keeps us up at night and start peaking again on what gets us out of bed in the morning!

All we need now is the right partners to scale the right conversation and start asking the right questions of the right people.

So any platform or brand looking for a purpose in the UK – looking for a conversation to fuel, inspire, support and celebrate – come on down. We have the beginnings of something good.

FOOTNOTES

LivingTheDream is planning to undertake 10 workshops across the UK in 2015 – simply to start asking the right questions of the right people; of what better might look like for them – in their language, in their words and from where they are standing. The curated outcomes will then be shared with the constituencies of action – local communities, councils, faith leaders, collectives, interested parties, brands, institutions and organisations – to adopt, reflect and act upon to start making better a reality.

Living The Dream & the art of smarter, lighter living is an organically developing theme rooted in the original Dream in A Box UK Dream project workshops and part of a wider DreamInABox initiative which includes the founding China Dream movement run in China through NGO JUCCCE and spearheaded by the inimitable Peggy Liu; inspiration and co-founder of all things DiaB.

Buttery Invention and the perils & possibilities of a frictionless life.

26 Tuesday Nov 2013

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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brands, corporate responsibility, Frictionless living, volunteering

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If utterly friction free living ever arrives, we’re all toast. Thankfully, I sense the human condition will never allow it to happen.

Whatever the technology buffs and lifestyle innovators might claim or predict, our everyday humanity is rather attached to the grubby, physical realities of its ruck and maul existence.

Furious invention is doing its damnedest to move us all out of the real world into a new era of technological and existential hovering – an avatar and clone-like experience of existence that allows us to remove any need to touch the scratchy sides of real life at all.

We now find that even the biologists are in on the game, creating data-based life forms capable of reproduction and evolution, utterly devoid of any human interaction. Soon we can just task a genome-mapped data-modelled living clone of ourselves to live the grubby truths of our ‘real’ lives while we hermetically seal ourselves in some floating chamber of frictionless fabulousness.

The death of ageing is yet another example of our need not only to remove the experience of friction but also the evidence of it: in this instance, that of our very existence and its impact on how we look – God no, we cant have that. That would be, well, rubbing our faces in it so to speak. Friction, of a different kind but friction none the less

Ok, yes, some frictionless living is very welcome and gratefully received.

With everything from frictionless payment to Iris recognition passports, travelators and the soon predicted absence of any friction of the London Transport staff kind on the Underground, one could feel that we’re well on the way to friction free living.

So it’s not for want of alternatives or invention that we still broadly stick to each other and the real world.

Perhaps it has been bred into us to cling to our mortality and its incumbent human flaw and frailty.

As centuries of poets, writers, artists and philosophers have tirelessly pointed out, it is only when we’re closest to the mortal, fragile truth of our own humanity that we feel most alive. Right now, thankfully, that seems to be the way we still like it.

We wouldn’t it seems change it for the world. Why? Because it’s in the scrape and the scuff that we remind ourselves that we are living feeling beings.

Indeed, some would say that it is only the addictive nature of human friction that will save us from a data-mapped genome-shaped self-generating binary oblivion.

The good news it seems is that the harder technology and lifestyle innovations try to separate us from the scratch-and-sniff interaction of human collision, the more we seem to crave its reality.

It is for the best that technology and its providers (and in turn, the brands that utilise their miraculous invention) are forever enabling us to hover just that little bit higher above the world by ever increasing degrees.

It triggers the Newtonian truth of equals and opposites. Which is both good – and of course, bad. Which is, in its own way, good.

There seems to be a direct correlation between our degrees of rare being and those of our base doing. The increasing speed of our ascent to technologically enabled dislocation seems to be matched only by the equally increasing speed of our descent into a playground of a more primal and connected nature.

As a species, we need to watch how life plays its self out both in ourselves and more importantly in others – it’s part of how we learn – it’s part of how we commune – it’s part of how we improve – it’s part of how we evolve as creatures. In the crash bang wallop of human contact.

It is only through our proximity to our own kind that we learn to navigate both the heights and depths of ecstasy and desperation in our human existence; and in turn proof ourselves against its worst rages of circumstance. It is also only in our real-time bumbling through our immediate environment, and in our connection to it, that we can truly gauge how and to what degree we and our surroundings are co-dependent – and in more human terms, decipher where the edges of our misanthropic and philanthropic selves truly lie.

It is only in being human amongst humans that we remember how to be human.

And it is only by our scraping by, getting through, and rubbing along that we remain sentient extant human beings connected to the world and the people around us.

Human Friction is the root of responsibility – the thing that keeps us on the right side of the walled ghetto of separated existence – and friction is what we as individuals and collectives need to secure our base human reflex to protect and care for our own and the environment in which they thrive.

The ever increasing generational and communal dislocation that exists in our supposedly civilised societies and cultures – the removal of the friction between the old, the dispossessed, the poor, the disadvantaged –  brings only one reward – a stunting of the cyclical, fluid, ever increasing improvement of our human condition. I find it no surprise that the most recent generation in our most civilised societies are the first in centuries to look forward to a poorer quality of life than their parents, as measured by almost every indicator.

If a brand wanted to champion a more evolved human existence they’d move the ‘frictionless’ dream and every new piece of technological improvement that delivers it out of the ‘human progress’ tray and into the ‘table stakes’ tray: their development a cost of doing business and being best in class: as opposed to being their ‘purpose and reason to be’

Having done that they should lift every communal and people powered initiative they have up and into the centre of everything they do.

Frictionless life is no life – friction is the visceral, flawed dirty engine of our humanity. And in a Newtonian world, the more you remove one form of it, the more you need to add of the other.

When people take back control of their own destiny – and when communities take back control of their own everyday lives, the impacts are astonishing.

For example, brands who unlock the desire of young people to apply their precious time to recreating the frictions of ‘together’, reap an exceptional reward. The rise of youth volunteering in communities around the world: and the impact on brands of organisations like RockCorps are both beautiful and redeeming – but more importantly they point to the value of friction to improve our existence.

When people re-engage with the beautiful human truth of finding the right way to rub along together; when they remember that their fellow and neighbour is if not ‘family’ mostly a friend; when they learn how to embrace the good bits of progress and all of its technological toys as a means and not an end; suddenly humanity blossoms.

Any brand or business therefore has to realise that our increasingly frictionless life needs an offset strategy – it needs friction.

They must realise that for every leap forwards that technology might proffer their ambitions, an equal and opposite people-powered investment in people’s everyday lives must come with it.

So figure it out please. If you don’t, we’re going to need a whole lot of peanut butter, marmite, honey and jam.

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