5 January 2022. Trends | Didion
Overhyped trends for 2022 | Joan Didion and ‘the psychic hardpan’
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#1: Overhyped trends for 2022
At this time of year I get weary of reading over-blown accounts of trends that are going to be big in the coming 12 months—because, let’s face it, trends don’t really work like that.
So kudos to Fast Company for publishing a list of seven trends for 2022 that they thought were over-hyped. Each of the seven has been proposed by a different contributor.
In keeping with Just Two Things tradition, I’m going to pull out two of the seven, with their reasons for choosing them. But just so you are reassured, the full list does include the Metaverse, Virtual Reality, and NFTs.
But let’s look at design instead:
The soft, friendly design aesthetics targeted to millennials... had a good run: Think large, flat planes of “millennial pink” and other neutral and pastel shades, Instagram-friendly photography, illustrations with quirky characters, and fonts that have a distinctly retro feel... But, as they say, all things must pass. So, cue up Gen Z design, right? Not so fast.
This is Kevin Grady at the design company Lippincott. He’s expecting a whole lot of Gen Z design in 2022,
characterized by a bolder (hello, neon), more experimental, and empowering look and feel.
He’s just not expecting it to work.
A generation that doesn’t want to be pinned down, doesn’t want to be pinned down. The individuality this self-reliant generation demands requires a whole new level of flexibility. They’re a moving target, and most brands will inevitably fall several steps behind.
The other one I’m going to pull out specifically is a piece by Nichole Rouillac, the founder of Level, on the gap between DTC (Direct to Consumer) and sustainability. The large gap:
We order bottles of organic soap, wrapped in plastic... We subscribe to a toothbrush promising intelligent top-ups, which breaks and floods our cabinet with endless refills—their marketing telling us that we now need their useless chewing gum dispenser, too. Boxes, wrappers, tape, labels, stickers, polystyrene, bubble wrap. Every day.
Of course, one of the problems is that everything is too cheap; the external costs on the biosphere aren’t factored in:
(P)roducing products ethically is not cheap. The cost of rising sea levels, drought, and catastrophic weather is not cheap. The daily loss of habitat and species is not cheap. So why should your razor be?
These are obvious points, but it’s a good question—if DTC is a continuing trend, and the pandemic has certainly accelerated it, how do we do it in a way that doesn’t accelerate the level of consumption, the level of waste, or the amount of single use plastic.
The other two on the list? Jason Schlossberg decides that “the cult of efficiency” has had its day, and Vivianne Castillo suggests that the idea of remote and/or hybrid work doesn’t really mean anything.
She suggests instead that “The future of work is a trauma-informed workplace”. This is an interesting idea, but I think I need more than three paragraphs in Fast Company to really understand it.
#2: Joan Didion and ‘the psychic hardpan’
The writer Joan Didion died just before Christmas, and with commendable speed the writer Zadie Smith managed to conjure a short memoir of the impact that Didion’s work had had on her.
Didion emerged blinking into the light in the 1960s when a collection of her longform articles, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, was published. She was associated, certainly critically, with the writers in the so called ‘New Journalism’—people like Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese, who experimented with the form, style, narrative, and length, of non-fiction.
(Photo: Incase/flickr, CC BY 2.0)
There’s actually relatively little full-length non-fiction work by her; mostly her metier was long-form journalism. Her last substantial works were The Year of Magical Thinking, her account of the year following the death of her husband and lifelong partner John Gregory Dunne, and Blue Lights, about the death of her daughter in 2005.
Zadie Smith’s piece focusses on the impact the Didion’s writing had had on her in the 1980s, when she was living in New York, and I will call out three things from that.
Didion’s watchword was watchword. She was exceptionally alert to the words or phrases we use to express our core aims or beliefs. Alert in the sense of suspicious. Radically upgrading Hemingway’s “bullshit detector,” she probed the public discourse, the better to determine how much truth was in it and how much delusion. She did that with her own sentences, too. Rereading her, you find her astringency relentless, undimmed by age.
Her metier, perhaps, was that she went against the grain. Smith mentions an essay that Didion wrote in the period after 9/11 about the way that whole topics were removed from public consideration—from ‘the willfully unexamined “US relationship with Israel”’ to the motivations of Al Qaeda. (Susan Sontag had been generally condemned for trying to understand these.)
Didion’s target was the “psychic hardpan.” This she located just beneath the seemingly rational or ideological topsoil, which she found to be “dense with superstitions and little sophistries, wish fulfillment, self-loathing and bitter fancies.”... She wasn’t looking for approval. Would not be bullied by what “everyone” was saying or what “everyone” believed. Abhorred the kind of thought that forecloses thought.
Smith’s target in the memoir, in a way, is herself. In the eighties, when she discovered Didion’s writing, there weren’t many role models for women who wanted to write with authority. And this was one of the things that Didion provided:
I remain grateful for the day I picked up “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and realized that a woman could speak without hedging her bets, without hemming and hawing, without making nice, without poeticisms, without sounding pleasant or sweet, without deference, and even without doubt. It must be hard for a young woman today to imagine the sheer scope of things that women of my generation feared women couldn’t do—but, believe me, writing with authority was one of them.
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