Dopamine Fasting, Disney+ and Gift Buying Dread

Rediscovering Our Natural Systems

During a dopamine diet you have to fast from everything - no eating, no looking at screens, no listening to music, no exercise, no touching, no eye contact. Just sitting peacefully in your thoughts so the next time you get dopamine it feels that much better. Dopamine avoidance is the idea that in order to feel happy, one must feel nothing for a while. We have a constant dopamine rush every day from notifications, phones, emails, etc. that we are becoming immune to its effects. We actually crave more dopamine because the activities that used to give us pleasure no longer do. 

Silicon Valley is known for its innovation and ingenuity, but how much of that is just a rebranding of systems and ideas that we already know? Referring to one of our Elements of Culture, Refreshed Classics, Director of Cultural Strategy Steve Goldberg said that we are able to see how the tech elite have been able to rebrand retail (Amazon), sleep, and now we are seeing meditation rebranded as Dopamine Avoidance. 

Refreshed Classics is fitting into culture outside the hyper-niche Silicon Valley community. We recently saw Instagram roll out the removal of likes from their platform in the U.S. As Senior Cultural Strategist Brendan Shaughnessy asked, “Will Instagram plan content around this new update to provide notifications that will act in place of ‘likes’?” Or, as Merlin Ward, director of cultural systems, said, “Will the trend of deprivation follow into other facets of our lives?”

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Gifting Your Algorithm

‘Tis the season to gift your loved ones: Where shopping turns into a dreaded activity of buying for those we hold closest in our lives and we must find a gift for someone that says “when I saw this I thought of you”. There could be an easier way of buying gifts that eliminates the pain of trying to find the perfect present. Senior Cultural Strategist Courtney Emery posed a question to the group, “Why can’t we share our Amazon algorithm with someone else?”

Yet there’s another side of holiday shopping: self-gifting. When something catches your eye, your commitment to buying gifts has turned into a shopping spree for yourself and can make many feel guilty. In fact, 50% of all purchases on Black Friday in 2018 were spontaneous and 80% of Black Friday shoppers ended up purchasing a gift for themselves. Self-gifting is the norm and on the rise. But as Director of Cultural Strategy Olivia McLean puts it, maybe this holiday season instead of self-care we need selfish-care and put ourselves at the top of our lists! 

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Refreshed Nostalgia

The energy surrounding the Disney+ launch and new content spawning from old IP, demonstrates the desire to expand the life around beloved characters and stories. There’s been a recent uptick in the resurrection of IP content to create new spinoffs on exclusive platforms. Disney+ launched with 10 million subscribers during the first day with 2 million streams of its new Star Wars series, The Mandalorian. Netflix, not to be outdone, also announced the news of a partnership with Nickelodeon highlighting a spinoff of one of its most important series, SpongeBob.  

This brings up an interesting microtrend that Senior Cultural Strategist, Courtney Emery, has been tracking. She calls it Media As Software, which is the idea that media is a commodity that can be continuously updated and built upon, not fixed to one moment. For example, the new Sonic the Hedgehog film - when the trailer premiered in March fans were horrified of the reimagining of a character so integral to their childhoods. The director promised to correct the design - so when the updated trailer premiered fans felt validated in the new outcome. We are seeing that any and all content can change quickly, be updated with the times, and censored in the blink of any eye without any evidence of what it was before (check out Disney+ censoring of The Simpsons). 

A lot of the content being reborn for today’s audiences is children’s content. By reviving these nostalgic classics, they are not only allowing older audiences to relive these movies and shows, but also opening it up to an entirely new generation of watchers. Perhaps we will even start to see movies re-release with additional easter eggs that allow people new surprises from a movie they may have watched a hundred times before.