Exit the Rat race

What are children?

Susceptible, young, impressionable, vulnerable, little juice boxes of money. The Money Machine doesn’t care if you’re too young. The Money Machine plays the long game. If it can begin procurement from the start, do you think it would? Why wait? The Money Machine knows what it's doing.

Consumerism does not care about children, they are just beginner consumers, and manipulating them to be - reap great rewards. The Money Machine is an ATM with a section for adults and a section for children as young as toddlers. The user interface is guided by a cartoon character who makes the ATM easy to use and personable for them. The Money Machine is depicted in an eerie and empty outdoor space that is dimly lit. Would you feel comfortable letting your child use this ATM at 10 pm?

Food advertising is a particular concern for children because of their inability to consider if something is healthy for them. All they know and need to know is if the food they eat tastes good. Children who can’t even speak can still associate the McDonald's logo with their salty and delicious french fry, or the crisp sound of a pop can opening could trigger the bright and refreshing sensation they could get if they took a sip of soda.

These are nuanced core memories that are formed early in our psychology which are unshakable. When we grow older, and through our formative years, those impacts snowball into - what is the consuming adult.

 50% Off is a novelty desk toy that is essentially a miniature guillotine you use to cut your money. It speaks to the voluntary and impulsive spending we sometimes do. Why do we spend the way we do? Research suggests that when we feel stressed or insecure, we spend money to make us feel better - “emotional spending”. It may provide us with a sense of control over our lives when other aspects don’t feel so controllable. It isn’t just negative emotions that can lead us to spending, even an abundance of positive emotions can make us more willing to open up our wallets. 

Researchers at the University of Michigan conducted a study from 2009 to 2013 with over 5,000 participants that indicates spending has a 5 times higher effect on life satisfaction than that same amount earned in increased income. It turns out that people love to spend money, and to some extent, you actually can buy happiness. That still doesn’t come with its own costs though. Tim Kasser an American psychologist and author of Psychology and Consumer Culture: The Struggle for a Good Life in a Materialistic World notes that there are negative long-term effects of subscribing to a materialistic life. Materialism has negative effects on people’s prosocial values such as empathy and generosity. He also says that as people become interested in money, image, and status they are less likely to engage in ecologically beneficial activities. So yes, spending money may make you immediately happier, but becoming consumed by a materialistic lifestyle may not do the same for the others around you, or your concern with the environment.

Our dollar, like our attention is our vote. What we choose to do with our vote will reward the entity that obtains that vote. There are business and design strategies that prey on emotional spending habits that are firm within human psychology. The next time you browse online shopping for the sake of it, consider a contribution to the money guillotine. There may be no difference.

 How much of our spending comes from trying to please others? Leaderboard is a dating app that includes statistics such as your net worth or how much debt you owe. It asks questions about how our image and status is affected by our financial life. In the persona examples, we have three people, Lilly, Max, and Ethan. In Ethan’s profile picture, we see him posing with an expensive car in a nice suit. At first glance, you might assume he is wealthy and doing well for himself, but then we see how much debt he is in and realize he may be living above his means. Would Ethan ever post a profile picture of him posing next to his cool car if he knew we’d see his debt figures? The opposite could be said for Max, who does not seem to be living above his means. His profile picture of him excited about a fish he caught and his net worth being in the green may suggest he lives a simple, but content life. Between the two, Max becomes more attractive in the ecosystem of the Leaderboard.

The predicament we find ourselves in with the Leaderboard is that we might not use the app because we’d be ashamed to reveal we are not living as honest of a life as we seem. The question becomes about why we are not transparent about our financial lives. Does keeping our financial lives in the dark also keep us in the Rat Race? If our finances were on display would we consume differently? Not focusing on our outward appearance, and trying to fake it till we make it, but focusing on responsible spending. The Leaderboard also points out how tied together our finances are with our status. Modern culture has made these two inseparable, for they are key factors of partner selection.

 The Cost of Living is a hospital ventilator that takes its payment via a “coin slide”. The exchange rate for service is $1.05 for 1 second of its use. A study done by the NIH concluded that it costs $1,522/day to operate a ventilator in the ICU (or $1.05 per second). A person unfortunate enough to require one of these ventilators is shown a new definition for the cost of their living. On average, patients on mechanical ventilators were required to be hooked up for 4 weeks for a total cost of $42,616. That’s 170,464 quarters, enough quarters to outweigh a 2012 Ford Fiesta.

Imagine a world where there are no more dollars, no more checks, no more cards, and only quarters. Everywhere we spend our money, we have to interact and submit our payment via the coin slide. Might we become more aware of how much money we spend if we took away the convenience of large format payment? The Cost of Living tries to show us how we have forfeited our familiarity and perceived value of money for convenience and ease. It’s quite easy to lose touch with the value of our money in the world of 1-tap payments and automated subscription services.

“The Cost of Living” could have been designed to take credit card or cash as payment, but the mechanical coin slide is a feature we share experiential frustrations with. How many quarters have you dropped trying to align them with the slots? How many times have you nicked your hand on the unforgiving metal rail when pushing in your payment? And most importantly how long does it take you to insert your payment into the coin slide? Surely, more than 1 second. The design decision to use the lengthy payment method of the coin slide combined with the operating time of a mere 1 second suggests this mechanical ventilator would be impossible to keep up with, while trying to provide the person attached to this lifeline with oxygen.

The true story of “The Cost of Living” comes from the high prices associated with American health care. A report done by West Health and Gallup showed that 14% of their participants “know a friend or family member who died in the last 12 months after not receiving treatment due to an inability to pay for it”. They also stated that the amount of people who skipped out on healthcare because of its cost has tripled during the height of the 2021 COVID-19 pandemic. The figures they show about Americans’ views on health care are quite shocking, but in the end, it boils down to America not yet being able to justify the cost of living for everyone.

 In the U.S. the average household has $8,942 in credit card debt, with the average APR of 20.68% it’s clear that credit cards work against people in our consumer-focused society.

Has spending become too convenient? What does convenience have to do with the way we spend money? Does it work against us for convenient large-format spending to be so easy of a task? Imagine a foot-long credit card, the cumbersome credit card. It’s inconvenient to carry, where do you store it? What reactions do you get from the barista when you bring it out? This credit card also has two ends of payment, one end works, and the other does not. With the ends being identical, you can’t tell one side from the other. Giving you a 50/50 chance of holding up the Starbucks line and receiving the news that “your payment has been declined”. Having to ask if the Barista could try the other side. If this card were given to people in substantial credit card debt, and the Barista knew that - How would this make you feel? Would you feel ashamed, purchasing your 3rd-morning coffee this week - publicizing your financial insecurities?

There is also a difference in the feelings associated with paying when we spend with credit or debit vs fiat cash in hand. Ofer Zellermayer from the University of Carnegie Mellon coined the concept of “the pain of paying” in his PhD dissertation. He conducted a study showing that when we pay with cash we actually feel a sense of agony, parting with our money, and that paying with card gives us joy.

All this goes to say that a seemingly harmless credit card has a litter of design decisions within the user experience that influence us to spend. Credit cards are not a design that helps everyone, but works against some of us. The credit card user experience is in a way designed too well, it’s an effort to chase KPIs and last quarter’s figures instead of serving the people it was made for.

 When you use the internet, you are inadvertently creating a consumer profile of yourself. Advertising companies create an image of you based on your hobbies, age, income, lifestyle, etc. The data collected is then used to form an assumption about things you might be in the market for. If you spend an evening being curious about embroidery techniques, you’d bet that your social media ads would be filled with the latest embroidery machines and online courses to take. You might ask - “Well, when did I ever sign up for that?”. The answer is that it’s whenever you agreed to the terms and services of downloading the apps on your phone, or when you created your Google account. And it may even feel like these ads are harmless. “These advertisements aren't hurting me, they just want to better curate the things I might want to buy.”. I see this almost as a kind of Stockholm syndrome effect. We may have just grown into the idea that ads are okay, it’s just part of life, and maybe they’re helpful, but do we really need more stuff? And just because we agreed to the terms of services does that mean it’s ethical?

The conversation of ethics and data becomes more blurry when you realize the data you are contributing to is not just working against you, your data is used against people who are like you too. Your data is affecting others, and their relationship with consumerism. Even if you never fulfill a purchase from the advertisements, there’s someone else who has because of your data. Did you agree to that?

Alaska has the 4th largest crude oil reserve in the nation. They’ve decided that the residents of Alaska should share a piece of the profits that are one of their largest commodities. So in 2022, the recipients of the Alaska Permanent Fund (APF) received a check for $3,284. This check is given out annually, but the amount fluctuates depending on the revenue for the year. The point is that - Alaskans have decided that they should get paid for the oil their state provides, so why can’t we do the same with our data? Andrew Yang, a presidential candidate for the 2020 election seems to think so. In a speech at UNH Franklin Pierce School of Law, he states “... what is the oil of the 21st century? Technology, that’s right. Data, AI, software. Right now it just came out that data is more valuable than oil. What they’re doing in Alaska with oil, we can do for everyone in the country with technology money.”. In a New York Times Article, Jaron Lanier a computer scientist and pioneer for VR similarly says “The whole world of Silicon Valley is powered by your data. These are trillion-dollar companies and the value comes from your data. It’s absurd to say it’s not worth anything. It’s absurd to say that you wouldn’t make any money from it if you could. We make an estimate that a small family could in the very near term earn something like $20,000 a year from the value of their data.” Sam Altman the CEO of OpenAI has the right idea, he says that Open AI could do just that. All of the data his AI company uses could be given back. “Artificial intelligence will create so much wealth that every adult in the United States could be paid $13,500 per year from its windfall as soon as 10 years from now.

The point is that your data is for sale whether you like it or not, but it might be nice if we had more autonomy over who gets to benefit from your data. And as we continue to face more conversations about technological unemployment, maybe getting paid for our data can be part of some solution.

 Modern technological advancements afford us numerous pleasures in life. Science, engineers, and the blue-collared workers in dusty coal mines provide us with electricity for comforts such as heat, lighting, and the charge on our devices. We tend to forget how much goes into the small computer in our pockets we call - our phone. One contemporary issue that comes to mind is the issue of modern slavery in West Africa. There are slaves in the Democratic Republic of Congo who mine the cobalt that goes into creating our rechargeable batteries. They mined today, they mined yesterday, and they will mine tomorrow while you’re on the way to work. The new frontier of electric vehicles has created a high demand for cobalt miners who work in unhuman conditions so that some of us can enjoy an endless feed of funny cat videos on social media. The Do It Yourself iPhone is an iPhone broken down into its raw resources. It points out that none of us can create the phone from scratch if it really came down to trying to do it ourselves. The issue becomes more clear as we realize that this harmless phone we carry can be used in ways that work against us. To businesses and marketers, our phones are merely a way for them to shoot their shot at getting us to open up our wallets. We buy the phone once, but advertisements are riddled throughout its user experience, asking us for more. A science article viewed on a smartphone contained 1479 words, but throughout that article were 31 advertisements. A quick calculation determines that in this article there are 47 words per 1 advertisement that you have no choice in seeing if you wish to read the literature. Advertisements have become a non-negotiable artifact in the contract of living a modern life.

It’s quite grim to realize that so much pain and suffering goes into harvesting the resources to create your phone.

Which ends up becoming a tool to then harvest you.

 Of the current 47.8 million Americans age 65 or older, the average income is only $38,515 per year. Broken down into months, they get $3,209 per month to live off of while the median cost for assisted living is $4,051 per month. The discrepancy between living expenses and a small income is problematic, and the statistical verbiage such as “median” and “average” do not tell the full story. Those situated on the lower end of the economic spectrum may have to rely on their families to take care of their well-being.

yet, this financial riddle is just the tip of the iceberg. The complex equation doesn’t even factor in taxes, mortgages, medical insurance, or unforeseen emergencies. Enter Retirement Rations, a tangible visualization of the financial income of the elderly. Yearly income is meticulously partitioned between months and weeks, serving as a practical guide for prudent financial management. Retirement Rations also embody the end-game of financial life - a collective aspiration toward which we all strive. For those unfortunate enough to not receive social security or to have earned insufficient income throughout their career, accessing their share of rations becomes problematic. Your Retirement Rations will either grow or shrink depending on your habits. Retirement Rations are a privilege - a reward for those who navigated consumer culture well and correct. Be good, work hard, and Uncle Sam will take care of you. This is what modern life has to reward the participants of the Rat Race.