The Impulse Society

Are we becoming an Impulse Society? Paul Roberts thinks so:

A century ago, economic activity occurred primarily in the physical world of production. People made things: they farmed, crafted, cobbled, nailed, baked, brined, brewed. They created tangible goods and services whose value could be determined, often as not, by the measurable needs and requirements of their physical, external lives.

That relationship changed with the rise of the consumer economy. Sophisticated, large-scale industrial systems assumed the task of making many of the things we needed, and also began to focus on the things we wanted.

By the 1980s, computer speed was doubling, and computer costs were halving, every two years—a trend, known as Moore’s Law, that quickly transformed every sector of the consumer economy. Business processes, from design to marketing, could now be supercharged and accelerated. (In Detroit, for instance, the time needed to bring a new car from drawing board to showroom fell from four years to 18 months.) By cutting the time between investment and profit, computers gave business a potent new tool to generate the faster returns that Wall Street was demanding—but also to deliver the gratifications consumers were now coming to expect.

Humans, it’s safe to say, were not designed for a world of such easy gratification. Decades of research suggest that our brains, adapted for a prehistoric world of scarce resources and infrequent opportunities, are wired to prioritize immediate rewards and costs and to disregard rewards and costs that occur in the future. This natural bias against the future, so essential for our ancestors, is an Achilles’ heel in a modern economy built around immediate pleasure and deferred pain. Nearly every consumer proposition today, from credit to fast food and entertainment to social media and online shopping, capitalizes on our anti-future bias: in all cases, we’re provided immediate pleasure, while any costs, whether financial, physical, or emotional, are deferred so seamlessly that they vanish from our perception. It’s almost as if the evolving marketplace, once a force for personal discipline and deferred gratification (think of the Protestant work ethic) has flipped. Now, we’re urged to focus only on the present moment, and on maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain in that moment. The notion of future consequences, so essential to our development as functional citizens, as adults, is relegated to the background, inviting us to remain in a state of permanent childhood.

But humans aren’t meant only for dominance. We’re also meant to adapt to something larger. Our big brains are specialized for cooperation and for compromise—with other individuals and with the broader world, which for most of history did not cater to our preferences or “likes.” Daily survival depended on our ancestors’ capacity to conform themselves and their expectations to the world as they found it. It was only by enduring adversity, disappointment, and delayed gratification that humans gained the strength, knowledge, and perspective that are essential to sustainable mastery. Many traditional cultures regarded adversity as inseparable from, and essential to, the formation of strong, self-sufficient people. Yet the modern conception of character now leaves little space for discomfort or real adversity. To the contrary, consumer culture in the Impulse Society does everything in its power to convince us that difficulty has no place in our lives (or belongs only in discrete, self-enhancing moments, such as really hard ab workouts). Discomfort, anxiety, suffering, depression, rejection, delays, uncertainty, or ambiguity—in the Impulse Society, these aren’t opportunities to mature and toughen or become. Instead, they represent errors and inefficiencies, and thus opportunities for correction—nearly always with more consumption and self-expression.

To the efficient market, character is itself an inefficiency to be squeezed from the system. Once some new increment of self-gratifying or self-promoting capability is made available—a faster phone, more powerful car, quicker delivery service—the assumption of the consumer culture is that it must be put to use, whatever the consequences. The intensity of our self-centeredness is now being determined not by conscious decision but by the market.

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