Beauty Shot

So Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want?

And then let's talk business.

Wants can be unpacked, like boxes within boxes, like the nesting dolls sold by sidewalk vendors stationed outside The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Inside every want is another want, less visible to the outside world, but closer to our fundamental cravings—perhaps those wants we are afraid to speak out loud, because we would prefer to sound cool, smart, or like someone who can summon what they want effortlessly, like a celebrity who has simply to lift a finger to get a waiter’s attention (because they’ve had it all along).

I’ve been lucky enough to work with dozens of creative people and artists over the years, and watched them as they launched one project after another—be it gallery installation or record release, book or startup. I’ve also known, and loved, many people who haven’t accomplished the artistic goals they set. And what seems truer to me than any other truth about these two groups is that the difference comes down to how intensely they WANT.

What separates artists from non-artists isn’t talent but desire. Any fear they might have about how their work will be received is crushed by the force of their desire to make what they want to make. They are creatures of lust, not likes, and willing to suffer for their passions.

Or maybe they’re just the conduits for something larger than themselves? The English writer Dorothy L. Sayers took an idiosyncratic view of creativity, insisting that art itself had a “violent urge to be created.” Laugh if you will, she wrote, but “that a work of creation struggles and insistently demands to be brought into being is a fact that no genuine artist would think of denying.” (emphases mine)

Most days I agree with both sentiments: You have to want it, and at times it will feel like you have no choice and indeed must do it. Then I’ve noticed something else, too: Those who want too much often don’t achieve their desires either. (“As soon as you stop wanting something, you get it.” Thus spake The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (from A to B and Back Again.)

Want a thing too much, and the making—or finishing—will elude you. Why? I suspect it has to do with wanting all that surrounds the creation more, be it fame or revenge, rather than purely the thing itself, in its essence. Detaching from outcomes seems to help.

Effective wanting, if you’ll forgive such cold-calculus framing, is a forever calibration. Not too little, not too much. My sense is that our understanding of wanting’s power is still primitive, and like other frontiers of knowledge—the deepest workings of the brain, the nature of dark energy—we will know more in time. That’s the future I want, anyway.

—Megan Hustad

What do you want?

Why do we want what we want? Mimetic desire.

According to the theory of mimetic desire, we value a thing because we see someone else valuing it. Luke Burgis, author of Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire In Everyday Life, references French social scientist René Girard who spoke of a “Romantic Lie”—the belief that our desires are objectively our own. Instead, we get our cues about what’s desirable from our relationships with others, and in the event “we choose something that nobody else seems to want, we begin to doubt that we made the right choice.” Tricky, tricky. To hear more, become a Resident as we’re excited to have Luke Burgis in our Living Room Session on desire this coming Thursday, March 11.

Consider this example that Loretta Graziano Breuning, professor emerita of management at California State University, East Bay, shares in Psychology Today:

“Captain Cook, the explorer, saved his crews’ lives by manipulating their mammalian urges. He wanted them to eat Vitamin C to protect them from scurvy, which brought a horrible death to sailors on long voyages in the 1700s. The cause was unknown, but Cook observed that scurvy disappeared on German ships that served sauerkraut daily. So Cook provided sauerkraut, but his sailors refused to eat it. The problem was solved by putting platters of sauerkraut on the officers’ table, and permitting the sailors to help themselves from the officers’ platters. Soon, everyone wanted it, and Cook’s voyages were the first to escape the scourge of Vitamin C deficiency.”

Why do we want what we want? Genes.

Another explanation for why we want what we want can be found in our genetic makeup. Bill Sullivan, professor of pharmacology and microbiology at the Indiana University School of Medicine, answers a question everyone has asked at least once: Why did he/she not like me back? In a study women were asked to smell the underarms of men’s worn T-shirts and then rank them by best to worst-smelling odor. If a man and woman’s immune genes were more similar than dissimilar, the woman found the T-shirt’s smell horrible. Why? If parental genes are too alike, their child will not be as well-positioned to fight off pathogens. So “in this case, genes used odor receptors as a proxy to size up whether a potential mate’s DNA is a good match. Studies like this affirm that chemistry between people really is a thing.”

Why do we want what we want? Hormones, duh!

Testosterone

Along with lust and libido, testosterone (of which men typically possess higher levels) boosts our self-esteem, competitiveness, and dominance. Whereas the need for reproductive success was the sole interest in the primary age, it can now be similarly observed in business and our “winner-takes-all” culture. Some researchers consider testosterone the “entrepreneurial hormone,” some cite it as key to sales success. House Resident and management thinker Margaret Heffernan, however, argues that testosterone makes us less collaborative and leads to “egocentricity bias,” making team members less likely to take their colleagues’ views seriously.

Estrogen and Progesterone

While often thought of as “female hormones,” both estrogen and progesterone are also found in men (and influence weight and sexual desire). Estrogen and progesterone are mainly associated with their altering effect on mood, especially during ovulation and pregnancy. Given the influence of birth control, a longer reproductive life, and hence, more PMS, some countries are setting policies for menstrual leave. George Bronten points out that the interplay of these two hormones can also impact our decision-making. More progesterone in relation to estrogen? Faster decision-making is in the cards.

Cortisol

Known as the so-called “stress hormone,” cortisol is responsible for increasing pressure to react in a “fight or flight” situation, which in the more mundane aspects of contemporary life, can be triggered by mere decision-making. A 2015 study found that high levels of cortisol can hamper a leader’s empathy. The researchers claimed that the more responsibility—and the more stress—a leader had, the less accurate they were in identifying the emotional states of others. Stress-reducing perks and company cultures can therefore “unleash leadership potential in employees who might otherwise not show it.” The interplay between cortisol and testosterone is particularly critical. In her popular TED Talk, Amy Cuddy explained how “power poses” can boost testosterone and lower cortisol in the brain, thereby enhancing confidence and reducing anxiety. If, however, both hormones spike concurrently, it can lead to cheating and other unethical behavior.

Dopamine

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that makes us “feel good” (at least in our brain). It speaks to the most pleasurable desires of our lives, from food to intimacy to drugs, with the risk of turning from wanting to dependency. As businesses and leaders, these “feel good moments” shall come in careful doses, to keep healthy relations afloat. While the brain produces dopamine in response to rewarding experiences, the largest surge of dopamine doesn’t come from fulfillment but from anticipation. That’s music in marketer’s ears. And Silicon Valley has used the effects of dopamine to get us hooked on apps and digital services. Umair Haque speaks of a “dopamine economy” and writes: “We’ve gone beyond creating ‘consumers’—that was what the Mad Men did: today, we’ve created addicts of the algorithm.” William H. Davidow and Michael S. Malone argue in their essay on “dopamine capitalism” that Big Tech is now using “persuasive technology” to the effect of “personality-disorder marketing.”

Oxytocin

The one we’re all lacking now, as this hormone is known to emerge from physical touch and intimacy. Sometimes called the love hormone, the neuropeptide oxytocin creates warm and fuzzy feelings, affecting our social relations. Take note though—and note to brands wanting to be loved: recent research has found that depending on context and personality, oxytocin could also lead to antagonism. On the whole, however, researchers suggest the hormone is good for business: from boosting moral behavior to enabling a more sociable, enjoyable, and engaging workplace. In fact, Paul Zak asserts a direct link between oxytocin and two main ingredients of meaningful work: purpose and trust.

Does technology really know what we want?

Kartik Hosanagar, professor at the Wharton business school and author of A Human’s Guide to Machine Intelligence: How Algorithms Are Shaping Our Lives and How We Can Stay in Control, says “a third of your choices on Amazon are driven by recommendations. Eighty percent of viewing activities on Netflix are driven by algorithmic recommendations. Seventy percent of the time people spend on YouTube is driven by algorithmic recommendations.” And on a daily basis, the Google algorithm decides what we see on page one of our search results, so we’re past the point of algorithms only making recommendations.

But do algorithms really know what we want? Not in a meaningful way, according to Uri Gal, associate professor in business information systems at the University of Sydney. Predictive algorithms are trained by working off past data. These algorithms don’t actually predict; they extrapolate. Gal writes that “all that predictive algorithms can ever do is guess at what is going to happen based on what has already happened. Unfortunately, predictive models are also poor predictors of change. The more radical change is—different from existing patterns—the more poorly predicted it will be.”

In a world as complex as ours, past patterns can be useful but don’t tell the whole story. Pew Research Center quotes Bart Knijnenburg, assistant professor in human-centered computing at Clemson University, who nails it: “The goal of algorithms is to fit some of our preferences, but not necessarily all of them: They essentially present a caricature of our tastes and preferences.”

Now streaming: your unwanted emotions

Nonfiction Research—not your average market research company—uncovered America’s secret Spotify playlists and found that people are deliberately using music to feel publicly undesirable emotions that nonetheless need to be processed: sadness, frustration, loss, anger, and regret. They ask what it would look like if brands were to embrace and indeed cater to this need for emotional realism. On Thursday, March 11, Nonfiction Research will be with us in the Living Room.

If you’re not yet a House Resident, become one now and join us!

Apropos, here are the 10-most-personal-songs playlists of our two founders, Till and Tim, our musical director Mark Aanderud, editorial director Megan Hustad, and DJ MJ.

Till’s playlist

Tim’s playlist

Mark’s playlist

Megan’s playlist

Monika’s playlist

What's yours? Share with us.

Advertising: needing what we want, wanting what we need

Don Draper of Mad Men fame gives the quintessential pitch to illustrate how advertising can uncover and cater to our most profound desires, like nostalgia.

“It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards…it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the ‘wheel,’ it’s called the ‘carousel.’ It lets us travel the way a child travels — around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved.”

Nostalgia has been an evergreen in movies, too, perhaps most vividly portrayed in Casablanca when Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman reassure each other of their prized, exclusive possession: “We’ll always have Paris.” Nostalgia is not only a longing for a time gone by, in which all worldly matters were imbued with meaning; it also refers to a more existential sentiment. Coined by seventeenth-century Swiss physician Johannes Hoffer, who attributed soldiers’ mental and physical maladies to their longing to return home, the term “nostalgia” is a combination of the Greek nostos (home) and pain (algos). It means suffering from an “old wound”: cut off from a connection to profound truths.

Mad Men, of course, was pure nostalgia itself (and its 60ies retro-chic lived on in the recent Netflix hit, The Queen’s Gambit). We ache for an amber-hued period in the past that provides a bulwark against the erupting madness of the world — yet we simultaneously celebrate the moments when fortification fails, exposing human fissures across class, gender, and racial lines. Don Draper himself cites a poem by Frank O’Hara that describes the contradictions of this yearning: aren’t we all “quietly waiting for / the catastrophe of my personality / to seem beautiful again”?

Nostalgia is also at the heart of Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk’s novel The Museum of Innocence, in which the male protagonist, after a tragic ending to a nine-year-long romance, begins to collect every single object related to their love story as it unfolded, from start to finish. He eventually exhibits them in the house of the woman he was in love with, converting it into a “Museum of Innocence” (there is now an actual Museum of Innocence in Istanbul based on the book). As Pamuk writes, museums are containers of nostalgia and protect our greatest dreams, desires, and hopes. They defend ours—and advertising’s—most radical idea: that another life is possible.