The Hindu Business Line : The high traffic of experiences

A changing country, a developing economy and rapidly evolving technology have made people busier, less attentive, more impatient but hungrier than ever for newer experiences..

We had fewer, but richer experiences in our growing years and we are witness to the tizzy of experiences thrown at the generation today. We can see the difference, and probably feel both the ‘highs’ – the one that comes from a richer, slower, in-depth life and the one that comes from a momentary euphoria.

Bolder, bigger, faster: The T20 format is a realisation of such desires.

Anupama Koppar

In the first part of an introspective piece, the writer mulls over how this hunger for wanting it all, in the here and now, has affected consumption at various levels — of news, of entertainment, of brands — and suggests ways in which this new behaviour can be used to deliver better products and services.

Today, we as a ‘people’ seem hungry for newer, better, bigger experiences in life. No matter how transient the experience, or the time pressure we may feel, we want to ‘not miss out’ on any experience. It’s hardly surpri sing that our lives seem like a series of short-lived experiences. The days of a few deep and enriching experiences are numbered. Our hunger for a lot more in much lesser time is changing our value systems faster than we can imagine and more than we would like to believe.

Are we headed towards a shallow superficial people? Are we going to be become ‘more, here and now’ in everything including in our relationships?

Is there enough evidence to say this? Well let me cite a few observations … Homes were painted once in five years; today there is a fresh coat of paint every year. Consumer durables such as refrigerators were bought as a ‘will use it for at least 15 years’; now it’s a new fridge every five years or whenever an exciting model hits the market. Things outlive their appeal in much shorter time. It’s even more apparent in technology-related products — a new laptop every year, a new mobile every eight months, a new car every 15 months. There is no end to our hunger for newer things and we must have them quicker.

Apart from things, even our ability to enjoy media at leisure is affected. We would rather watch T20 cricket and at best one-dayers; five-day matches seem too tedious. Our movies are getting shorter. Most of the box office collection of a movie is in one weekend. And news coverage is another area in which our hunger for experiences is changing the way news it’s communicated – lots of news bytes in the first few minutes and then an elaborate coverage, so that you can zone out once you have multiple titbits of information. Even the books we read and the knowledge that we want to gather has to be in quick, small doses. There is a term called ‘knowledge snacking’ that is being used to describe how large amounts of knowledge and information can be given in a capsule.

The appeal is not just the ‘instant-ness’ but the ‘short-lived-ness’ that kicks in a quick rush of adrenalin. So while one ‘experience’ high is just about abetting, we feel the need to quickly move on to the next.

Like little frogs we are jumping on from one experience to another at rapid speed. Even before we have juiced out the emotional richness of one experience, we are on to the next. Unlike earlier, we do not toss around the experience in our minds … The pre-experience excitement, the high during the experience and the savouring of the feeling post-experience occur in such quick succession. So much so that our memory banks are sure to get confused over which experience to cherish and file away to grow into nostalgia some day.

Are we being pushed into this or is it our choice to behave such?

What is this obsession about multiplicity of experiences and getting it all ‘now’? How and why has this insatiability come in? Every once in a while these questions pop up in my mind … and I am sure in the minds of a lot of 30-somethings. We are the cusp generation, we have lived the shift from colour TV to multimedia, grocer shops to modern retail and good old Alankar Talkies to multiplexes. We had fewer, but richer experiences in our growing years and we are witness to the tizzy of experiences that are thrown at the generation today. We can see the difference; we can feel it and probably feel both the ‘highs’ — the one that comes from a richer, slower, in-depth life and the one that comes from a momentary euphoria.

Every breathing moment we have newer better things vying for our attention. Let’s look at it like this:

People are constantly looking for newer experiences.

People want to experience everything at one go and early in life.

Together the two create what I call a ‘high traffic of experiences’ in life. The point is, where is this taking us? What is this mad rush to live in the moment and create many more exciting moments so that life seems meaningful?

Psychologists say we are a sum total of the learned behaviour that we are exposed to. Will this high traffic of experiences alter our behaviour over a period? And slowly but surely change our value systems? And what all will this change affect?

It is a theory that in the long term behaviour leads to attitude and attitudes form basis of value system. Whether by choice or by force, if we keep creating the high traffic of experiences as a behaviour pattern, it is bound to re-engineer our value system.

(To be concluded)

The writer is Vice-President & Strategic Planning Director, JWT, New Delhi.