Have Fridays ever done you any good? Or rather, have they ever done you any better than Mondays, Tuesdays, or the other four days of the week? Statistics actually suggest that Fridays are one of the poorer days of the week, e.g., worse weather than the weekly average, fewer made inventions, lower than average GDP contribution, greater chance of oversleeping…

Still, everybody loves Fridays. Not because what it gives or ever has given, of course, but because of what it promises… 

Reading a column in the latest issue of Swedish trade publication Dagens Media, I stumbled on what must be the most morbid example of expectity (please scroll down to the early posts, if you’ve forgotten what that is…)

Having done nothing of significant interest career-wise since the release of the album “In the Zone” in 2003, Britney Spears manages to stay in the public eye and amass huge interest five years later – an almost endless time in the warp speed of the world of any. Generating more than 70 million Google hits, Britney is a multimillion dollar industry – even though her songs have not received much airtime for years. For all she has once achieved, Ms Spears is now one of the most famous and observed people on the planet, long outliving the 15 microseconds of fame any new achievement (like the quickly forgotten recent album release – do you even know its name?) - because of the expectations about her troubled future: how far will she go?

The website whenwillbritneydie.com  invites people to speculate on when and how Britney’s life will end. It attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors, and is a business in its own right, selling space to international advertisers.

In the world of any, anything is available to us anytime, anywhere. Having more leisure than ever before in modern history, time is not enough (money is usually not an object). Probably, the most compelling proof of this is that I am pretty sure that you were surprised by the first part of the previous sentence. Yes, we do have more free time on our hands than ever before (actually, an increase of 6-36 hours per week in the last thirty-forty years), but it feels like we have less.

One symptom of wanting it all in the world of any is the emergence of minisodes.  Addicted to Ricki Lake, but don’t want to miss anything else – minisode it:

In the world of any, there isn’t any end. The human being is not programmed to ever feel that too much is available to us. Then we would never be where we are today. Living on top of the world, we are, ourselves, the best testament that Barry Schwartz was not completely right. Our legacy – the Expectations society that we and our children will continue to live in.

Our anthem:

 Jeans, dates, a whopping 288,000 sites where you can buy popcorn. They are testimonies to the same thing: we live in the world of any. Anyone can buy anything, anywhere, anytime. Anyone can wear anything, date anyone, eat anything, see anything, anywhere, anytime. It is right there, 24/7. And we have the resources to get it.

 Barry says we don’t. Or we get unhappy. I say, that’s not true. More on that tomorrow, but in the meanwhile -what do you think?

And meanwhile, feast your eyes and ears on the wonderful banjo duet from Deliverance, and see if you can figure out its connection to Leon’s comment on the last post…

A third of all Italian men over 30 live with their mom and dad.

I googled “online dating” the other day, and more than 85 million hits flashed before my eyes within a second. What’s your flavor - Christian dating, DNA-driven dating, or maybe dog dating..?

Few are the people of today who have never uttered that sentence. Our closets stuffed with clothes (walk-in closet is actually the feature that has increased most in demand in the last five years, according to a Swedish real-estate agent), “I have nothing to wear” has become part of our everyday language. To our grandparents, that sentence is like Martian language. Having had less than a fifth the wardrobe of clothes that we have when they were at our age, they did have something to wear. So, are we better off now?

My colleague Barry Schwartz has made a career lately on that dilemma. I think he has some interesting takes, though he misses some aspects. Which we will, of course, revisit later…

In my last post, I mentioned the “truth of porn”. Simply put, the truth of porn is this: the more you give, the less it feels. In other words, the more naked you are, the less naked you feel. Porn stars do not think showing their private parts is very private.

Jenna Jameson is the most famous porn star of our time, her Google statistics are counted in eight-digit numbers and her homepage www.clubjenna.com is a massive industry. In 2004, she released the book “how to make love like a porn star”, which was an instant, mainstream bestseller. If you haven’t read it already, I recommend you do. Whereas it might give some hints on how to actually make love like a porn star, for those yearning to find out, it is primarily of interest because it provides some great illustrations of how mankind functions and how business works in this day and age (the book even spawned a spin-off written by Jenna’s ghostwriter Neil Strauss -”How to make money like a porn star”. Incidentally, it was banned in Singapore. I’m hoping my blog and upcoming book won’t be…)

In learning how to make love like a porn star, we find out that, not only does more feel less to the person that gives, but it also feels less to the person who receives. Intuitively, most of us know this; we all have some vague notion about what foreplay is supposed to be good for. But the truth of porn is not restricted to sex. As one can read between the lines in Jenna’s books, many porn stars fail to have long-lasting relationships because they strip-off their personal boundaries as quickly as their clothes – the relationships start at full maximum and allows for no time to evolve – no expectations to materialize.

The truth of porn suggests that less is more, as long as the “less” provokes people to expect “more”. It’s fairly evident if you think of the word striptease. A bisociation of strip and tease, it means that one teases by stripping. What people covet the most is what they cannot reach, but what they expect to find.

So, does “less is more” suggest that one should cover up and not yield? No, it suggests that one should constantly hint that there is more to come and build expectations. The truth of porn separates the expectities from the “15-microseconds-of-famers” and the successful businesses from the unsuccessful.

Note: Is the porn metaphor really necessary? Yes, we will delve further into lessons from porn later on, as it tells a lot about the human condition and the time we live in now…

It happens quicker than I expected, I am already turning into a real blogarazzi. I am starting to feel the urge to post private information about myself. Let’s see if I’ll elevate into an expectity eventually…

It’s a new year, and with it come new year’s resolutions. New year’s resolutions are actually a pretty good illustration of the nextopia concept, that is, our beliefs and hopes that the next things we do will be more exciting, satisfying, joyful: “The new year will bring great achievements and events and I will do really well”.

What are this year’s plans for me? Here’s some inside info about MD (that’s me – don’t you hate it when people refer to themselves in third person?). I will be a full professor very soon. Then I’ve finally struggled my way to the “academic top(?)” The new book will be released, working title: “Nextopia. Life, Business and Love in the Expectations Society”, what do you think about it? (Also, as I mentioned, “Think Inside the Box” will be released in English and Russian).

To widen my scope, I am also planning some really fun collaborations with interesting people, and to do an “inverse Bono” and release an album (whatever that means in the mp3 age). And I am probably going to be in jail.

OK, I am not yet a porn star and I feel that I may have been giving away too much, I’ll stop here. I look forward to receiving your input on these things later on. And as I have revealed quite a lot about myself right now (at least I still feel so), I expect you to do the same from now on. It’s a blogger’s law, you know (more on that later).

So, the conventional notion of blogarazzi is (both literally and metaphorically) yesterday’s news. What’s more interesting is that the real blogarazzi are not the people hiding in celebrities’ backyards – the real blogarazzi are the celebs themselves…The “give me some privacy” shout-out to journalists, photographers, and bloggers does not seem to include the celebrities themselves. Which makes their jobs as blogarazzi some much easier. And so much more powerful. Who can dig up more dirt on a celebrity than the celeb itself? Having previously closed their doors on the surrounding world, suddenly actors, artists, athletes, politicians, spill the beans, blogging about everything from their ongoing work with a new song, fights with the movie director at the set, or frustration with the team coach, to their relationships, kids, home decorations, and even yesterday’s dinner.

One reason for this, is that they are turning themselves into expectities, realizing that it is not their past achievements that uphold their celebrity, but rather people’s expectations of them. That’s a law of the jungle in the Expectations society.

Another reason for this is a very human trait called adaptation. Basically it means that we get used to things. Like diving into a cold ocean, first it’s terribly freezing but after a while the goose bumps vanish and you think the water is pleasantly cool. The same goes with giving away information – at first it may seem terribly private, but soon your bar is raised for what is considered to be terribly private. If you don’t believe me, ask anybody in the porn industry, it’s the “truth of porn”.

Still don’t believe me? Check out the average facebook profile. Or better yet, check out your own profile. Before facebook, would you even have considered giving away that information about yourself to hundreds or even thousands of people..?