How to live a meaningful life when the world around you is falling apart
Understanding the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation
Much of what follows is an excerpt from my 2019 book, Intuitive Marketing. I wrote that, obviously, with marketing in mind. My idea was that marketing didn’t need to be an annoying interference in people’s lives, that it could even be useful if it showed how products could help people achieve the goals they were already pursuing, rather than trying to fill them with new goals (the marketer’s goals) to fix some aspect of themselves that was broken … broken in a way that only the marketer’s product could fix. What is marketing, but a constant reminder of how inadequate we are: our clothes aren’t clean enough, our teeth aren’t white enough, our iPhone isn’t new enough? My idea was simple. If you’re going to have marketing — and it is a multi-billion dollar industry after all — maybe you could make it less intrusive, less demeaning, and less obnoxious. Let’s just say the marketing world hasn’t exactly rallied around my idea.
As my attention has shifted to more consequential topics like climate change, the end of fossil fuels, carrying capacity overshoot, and our energy transition, I wondered if any of these ideas might have relevance to our current dilemma. In that regard, I kept…
