foo for thought

Imagine a world without the word “new”. Imagine a world where you didn’t have to buy a new phone every couple years, you could just use the same piece of glass until you died. Imagine there’s never anything to upgrade, to try, to experience anew – just relived experiences until you get put in the ground.

Depending on how old you are, how comfortable this reality is may vary. If you’re older, perhaps you’re content with this. Traditions carried forward, nothing to stress about, seems like a decent way to live the rest of your days. The younger you are, the more uncomfortable this hypothetical becomes.

The Whimsy of Japan

I just got back from a 2-week long vacation to Japan. To say I was overdue for a vacation is an understatement. In my time of lolly-gagging around and eating the most insane takoyaki I’ve had in my life, I realized quite how stark the contrast is between American advertising and Japanese advertising. The bright lights, shiny colors, catchy mascots. Even Don-Quiote, the “Walmart” of Japan has a mascot, colorful lights, music, a theme song, and even a Ferris wheel in their Dotonbori location (no I didn’t ride it, was closed when we went).

And it goes much farther than anime and some urban areas, it affects how Japan perceives products, television, culture. Even the news is flashier than ours, “whimsy” is perhaps the only word for what I experienced when I was in Japan. And, I immediately realized that this is what their culture thrives on. Pachinko buildings every other block, buildings literally lined with crane machines where you could win everything from plush animals to… soap and other grocery store items! Granted, I was in a very urban and noisy area of Japan, the equivalent in America would probably be Times Square and that is in no way representative of the entire country.

But what did interest me was how much more fun it felt, generally in Japan than it does here. Even just the subway lines each having their own little jingle associated with each train. And yes, it’s per line, and even has variations going different ways! The Western mind cannot fathom this level of whimsy. We don’t have mascots, we don’t have jingles.

I would like to point out the potential reason of all this culture wise – their work/life balance is abysmal. Salarymen work 10 hour days and have like, no time to do anything. It feels pretty “work hard play hard” to me – the work days are so hellish that they need that level of stimulation to feel anywhere close to alive. So while I envy their level of whimsy from a tourist perspective, maybe I’ll pass with respect to the other side of the culture.

The Exploitation of “New”

Even though we don’t quite have Japan’s level of whimsy, almost everything we do is still affected by novelty. We are exploited to buy a new iPhone every year because well, the old ones don’t work and wouldn’t you love a fourth and fifth extra camera? Because you’re missing out if you don’t have them! New theme parks, new toys, products, makeup, restaurants – these are the things that keep us alive. Again, imagine a world without any of those and it pretty quickly turns into a world without color.

In white-collar work in America, especially in software engineering, I have felt an immense pressure to conform. To processes, to the order of how the system rolls. Instead of rejecting it, though, I’ve spent my career trying to make sense of it. And to an extent, it does make a good amount of sense.

Conformity and order is what you need to make a system work. A system that works is a system that’s well-tuned. This means it’s meticulously ripped apart from every angle, tested from every side. If you have a system that isn’t ripped apart like this, it’s considered an “engineering catastrophe” not just by the engineers, but by the people using them. This is because of a common phenomena in engineering where the more you scale a product, the more things will inevitably break.

So my entire career I’ve been thinking conformity and order is the way to go, got it. But then, why do we plan obsolescence in tech? iPhones surely can have better batteries than what they have, so why don’t they? It’s so they can sell more iPhones, obviously. This is where the reasoning stops for most people, including myself. Capitalism is the root of all evil, exploitation is ruining our lives etc.

If you decide to take it a step further though – why does this exploitation work – you realize it has a different, more interesting root. The exploitation works because, not only does it break our phones every two years, it preys on our craving for novelty. Our fear of missing out, our desire to be part of a group. Having something “new” isn’t always about practicality as much as you’d like to think. Even if your phone did work for an infinite amount of time, you’d still get jealous if your friends got new phones. You’d still look at commercials for new phones and go, “what if”. It’s the natural human trait of curiosity, that’s innate within us I think.

The Point of All This

This isn’t a pitch for a product or anything. It’s not a deep-dive into a facet of AI. It’s a high-level realization of how our desire for novelty affects everything we do. It’s a wakeup call for me to realize that systems need order, but humans need novelty. There’s a reason I’ve been playing Pokemon cards the past 10 years. It’s not because I’m strange for liking Pokemon. The strange part might be that I don’t ignore the craving for whimsy, I never have really. I do feel like a lot of people push it aside to be seen as “mature” or “put-together”.

But we only get one shot at life, might as well enjoy it right? Watch that anime you’ve been putting off. You don’t have to tell all your friends you’re into Naruto because you watch 2 episodes. But I think we could all benefit from trying new things and embracing the unknown, especially in our dull, non-whimsy Western civilization.