10 Ideas That Are Changing the World We Live, Work and Play In (Part 2a)

Ego Transcendence: Perhaps the biggest world-changing idea on the planet today, Part 2

Imagine what advertising would look liked if 65 percent of consumers were teenagers. (Of course, sometimes advertising does look like most marketers believe that most consumers are teens.)

What would prevailing fashions look like? How would retail centers look – and sound?

The answers to those questions don’t require a Ph.D. in consumer psychology to arrive at answers. Advertising would be raucous, rude and often vulgar – or hopelessly idealistic, heroic and romantic (with sex oozing from every pixel).

Fashions would be in-your-face, contra adult, ostentatious and audacious. Primary colors would dominate and pastels eschewed. Retail venues would be boisterously alive with sounds, colors, lights and smells. Mannequins would be strewn around sporting eerily weird (by adult standards) visages.

The customary excesses of youth would be metaphorically captured in every heartbeat of commerce. Narcissism – a term inspired by the mythical self-centered Grecian youth who a god turned into a flower – would be celebrated in every commercially framed visual and auditory statement directed to the adolescent majority. Impetuosity would be reflected, embraced and celebrated everywhere.

There would be no ambiguity, no nuance because, as brain scans have now shown, teens live in a world defined by the verb to be. Something either is or is not. There are no shades of gray, no maybe’s, no it depends. The teen brain is remarkable impervious to nuance.

Now imagine what advertising would look liked if 65 percent of adult consumers were 40 and older. Well, actually, you don’t have to image that. Sixty-five percent of adult consumers are age 40 and older.

Same follow on questions: What would prevailing fashions look like? How would retail centers look – and sound?

The answers are a bit more complex. Maybe it doesn’t take a Ph.D. in consumer psychology to come up with the right answers, but it helps a whole lot to know something about how worldviews, attitudes, values, behavior and even cognitive operations progressively undergo dramatic changes beginning around the onset of midlife.

These changes reflect something of a personal paradigm shift  that can begin influencing behavior as early as the mid-thirties and later throughout the forties. However, it appears that people generally begin to become aware of changes in behavior around the early forties.

So, whenever a person first becomes aware of new influences on his or her outlook on life – like deepened awareness of one’s mortality – narcissistic self-centeredness and materialistic influences on outlook and behavior ebb.

In midlife, the normal path of development leads to self-centeredness progressively giving way to others-centeredness. Aspirations link less and less to materialistic values. Lifestyles increasingly reflect desires for simplicity. Youthful tolerance for artifice dissolves in favor of authenticity.

While earlier the worldviews, values and behavior of others – especially peers – was a frequently tapped source of behavioral cues and clues, we grow more comfortable by the year with another source for guidance in our worldviews, values and behavior: ourselves.

During the process of all these changes, we begin to make progress in tending to one Carl Jung’s Seven Tasks of Aging: Letting go of the ego. According to Jung, gaining comfort with aging and dying depends on letting go of the ego – or ego transcendence.

People’s desires to give back, to leave a legacy, to enrich others with no expectation of return reflect the ego in recession.

As much as the zeitgeist would reflect consummate ego projection were society dominated by teens, now that adults 40 and older comprise the adult majority, the zeitgeist increasingly projects the effects of ego transcendence.

The rising influence of the so-called triple bottom line – People, Planet and Profit – draws much of its force from the zeitgeist of an aging society. Notably, philanthropy is growing at an unprecedented pace – double digit annual growth since the early 1990s, when people 40 and older became the adult majority for the first time.

Importantly, consumer trend watchers like Yankelovich, Roper ASW and Harris Interactive all report stronger philanthropic proclivities among Gen Y’ers or Millenials that seen among members of previous generations at the same age. This, along with numerous other traits attributed to younger people, demonstrate the influence of ego transcendence on consumers worldviews, values, aspirations and lifestyles among people of all ages. The implications for marketers are enormous, yet few have homed in on this idea even though it might be the most influential idea of all that is changing the world.

Next in this series: World-changing idea #3: The Ebbing Value of Expertise