There was a psychologist once names Erik Erikson who was among other things famous for his ability to hypnotize people. He was so prominent in fact that at one point, people were suspicious of even shaking his hand for fear that he would put them into a trance—that’s how good he was. Dr. Erickson, who had a lot of experience with the way people’s minds work and how easily they could be hypnotized, made an unscientific observation about people in general. He opined that the average person is actually only “awake” for about 40% of their day. The rest of the time we’re in some kind of self-induced trance.
At first, this observation shocked me; I felt it had to be wrong until I observed my own day. I remembered getting in my car, making a phone call… but how exactly did I get to work? Or in thinking about a problem at my desk, where did the time get to? Reading twitter online, scrolling… wait, where was I? It seemed I did have frequent, sustained lapses in “consciousness” during my days. I had never really thought about them as trances before, but perhaps Erickson’s observation wasn’t that far off.
But then I had a different thought: what if certain interactions between people depend on this trance state. Isn’t this what advertising is about? Mindless (as in “trance-like”) click through’s on a website? Politician’s spreading mind-numbing fear to encourage a vote? Aren’t some sales pitches designed to turn off critical thinking? Maybe in fact (and this is not a new thought at all really), our culture actually wants you “asleep.” Perhaps we’ve designed a system that is very good at inducing trance-like states. Again, this is not a new thought. One only has to go back and read the dire warnings on too much TV watching (complete with pictures of zoned-out families in front of a TV set) to see that we’ve been warning ourselves for decades about our propensity for falling into trances.
But here is a potentially new thought: what if we incentivized the opposite? What if we tried building systems, or talking and acting in ways that encouraged awareness? What would that system look like? Only the most cynical would argue that an aware society is a corrupt society. If awareness, or “being woke” is a rare and laudatory thing, then what are we doing to make it happen? And for those who approach us and are aware and awake, are we treating that moment as the precious sacred thing it is, or are we working for something that wants to turn that part of them off? Think about it (and I mean that!). If you’re in business, are you trying to convince someone of something, or trying to lull them to sleep and get a fogged out “yes”? Is your presence encouraging others to zone out, or stay awake?