20th Century Guy
One day back in the late ’70s, at my first job for a small publishing company in New York City, I returned to the office from lunch and my boss asked me where I’d eaten.
“Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips,” I told him.
“You have to be a teenager,” he replied, “or a shark to digest that stuff.”
That’s the way I feel about survival in the looming 21st century. You have to be constantly awake or riding a hormone high to keep up with the pace of change. My brain vibrates and smokes when I contemplate what awaits us in this new millennium that everyone seems so in a rush to get on with. I am far too gutless to even venture any predictions.
The folks at Y&R’s Brand Futures Group are not, however. Here are some of their visions for the 21st century, along with my 20th-Century-Guy analysis.
Science will create pharmaceutical, bio-neural ways to alter our perception of time, enabling us to take an hour out and feel like it was a week. Actually, this is a good one for geezers, as long as you’re in upper management and have the only key to the medicine chest. It’s the corporate downsizer’s dream. You can keep your elite team of crack Web page designers working all week long. Just stop by the office Sunday morning on your way to the golf course and slip some Cancun vacation pills into their Starbucks. If you really want to have some fun, throw some skin pigment pills in as well and feign jealousy over their tans on Monday: “Okay Sun Gods of the Western World. Vacation’s over. Can we get some work done around here?”
Microsoft millionaires and other young would-be philanthropists are still fully immersed in business and are likelier to fund startups with a charitable twist than to spend time researching deserving nonprofits. The opportunities abound here for shiftless, demi-digital 20th Century Guys. Here are some candidates on our venture capital list: Jimmy ‘n Joey’s Snail Darter Casino & Lounge, The Home for Retired Cobol Programmers, Grateful Dead Fan Relief Fund.
Marketers will heed our advice to “tune their radar to religion,” and religious overlays on positioning will turn the Supreme Being into the top endorser. Bigger than Michael? Get real. While this would appear to be the inevitable high point on the nothing-is-sacred curve, the gurus at Y&R ignore the fact that God may be a touch too controversial to make it as a pitchman. For while he giveth the sun, moon, and stars, he also bringeth famine, storm, and pestilence. At any given time, someone somewhere in the world is none too pleased with Him. And just think of all those TV spot iterations you’d have to produce to satisfy Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists. Bottom line, it’s not new. Catholics with Bingo and Fundamentalists with direct response have made use of His Almighty fundraising powers for ages.
Localism will offset globalism, and tangibility will counterbalance virtuality. I have no idea what this means, so this one I won’t worry about.
“Know everything about everything” will become the consumer mantra, fueled by the boomers’ ongoing battle against mortality and a rising tide of techno-fear. Consumers will demand to know where the cabbage [in their coleslaw] was grown, how the soil was fertilized, how the mayonnaise was manufactured. Okay, now hold it right there. Any boomer still eating mayo in 2018 who isn’t already dead has nothing to worry about. And why do any self-respecting boomers want to live so long anyway? The world’s just going to get more technologically complex as we grow increasingly more simple. I say, install that synthetic duodenum and bring on the cheesesteaks!
Space obsession will take off again. NASA is assembling the international space station, and the tourism industry is extending feelers into the realm of consumer space travel. Oh that it comes true. This is our best hope for getting rid of all those annoying, Gen X, dot-com millionaires. Load all those Skywalker wannabes on a space ship, point it at Neptune, and . . . See ya!
Ah well, maybe the 21st Century will turn out all right. Maybe all those fine young techno-savvy men and women will tire of making all that money and invest their spare time helping to repair the broken down bodies of those of us who grew up eating twinkies and emulating the Marlboro Man.
But probably not. And we’d hardly deserve it. We’re all, in the words of The Kinks’ Ray Davies, paranoid, schizoid products of the 20th Century.
