Minimum Viable Personality (2011)
I love that marketing works, and that people want to believe in values, and will band together over those values.<p>However lately, I&#x27;ve felt that especially in the US, values -- or more accurately -- symbols of values have become more important than actual tangible outcomes or functional real achievements.  For people as individuals and as groups.<p>I guess of course that I&#x27;m especially thinking about our politics and social emphases these days.  And maybe it&#x27;s just gotten slightly worse that you notice it, fueled by Instagram and sound bite technology.  Maybe even the way we market products and companies (come for the values!) contributes to our political discourse.<p>Think about any movement out there at present -- MeToo, conservative agenda, liberal agenda, organic produce, gentrification, almost any major movement.  If you really get into the issue, you find that the symbol of the thing is actually a very, very small almost non-representative case of the situation as a whole.<p>Immigrants are not invading in hordes.  Men at work are not harassing every female employee.  People are not trying to kick out elderly widows to turn the block into a shopping mall.   They&#x27;re all symbols of the most extreme cases, and we latch on to them because they&#x27;re recognizable, inflammatory, and get us riled up to want to do something.  As always the rare, incredible threat dominates our minds so much more than the mundane everyday threat.<p>But sometimes I think, a society needs to think about the whole and not the extreme cases.  And give up being obsessed with achieving symbolic victory, and instead actual (minor, boring, incremental) achievements for the whole.   That&#x27;s much harder to get people inflamed to vote for.<p>The current climate is why we got tax breaks for a couple of billionaires at the expense of millions of people with mortgages.  It&#x27;s a symbol of someday when I&#x27;ll be a millionaire!  (Never going to happen, on average) . When did you last thank the policymaker who came up with the mortgage deduction, something that you take advantage of every day?<p>Your shoe is not going to make you a star athlete.  An immigrant is not knocking on the door to take your job -- that was decided decades ago.  For every policy you put in place to protect the imaginary elderly widow, you make it harder for 10 young people to have an affordable place to live.<p>Stop believing so much in symbols.