Over the last week or so a meme-quote has been trending on social media. It has thousands of reactions (likes, hearts, claps, and care), thousands of comments have generated multiple conversation-threads talking about the subject of the meme and thousands of re-shares have peppered the feeds of thousands of social media users.
What I’d like to do in this blog piece is something I’ve always been too afraid to try. I’d like to break down a popular meme and introduce the idea that it could very well be a behavioral program.
The last time I introduced a thought based on my instinct and intuition, I was skewered and some sort of evidence was demanded. Therefore, I need to qualify this piece by saying, once again, this piece is not the news. We, Book of Ours, are not the news. We are not researchers. We are not fact-pushers. We are creatives who live purely in instinct.
And my instinct told me not to trust this meme.
The first thing I do when I look at a meme is see if the quote is attributed to someone. In this case it is. Apparently Jason Christoff wrote the quote. I don’t know who that is, so I had to look him up.
It’s difficult to pin down who he is or what his background is, but this is what I found:
“Jason Christoff has developed a world wide reputation as a self sabotage coach who makes complex issues easy to understand for his clients. Jason discovered very early in his career, after managing one of Canada’s most successful weight loss clinics, that health and self sabotage were inherently connected. Jason is interviewed across the world every month, appearing on various podcasts and radio shows, regarding his highly effective methods for overcoming self sabotage, losing weight and how to rise up to your full potential.
Jason also leads by example for his clients, using his immense experience learned when he overcame his own self sabotaging behavior, which had driven him to the brink of disaster. Jason has written over 1300 articles on a wide array of topics, all available here for free on this website. Jason believes that not only can we save ourselves with effective coaching…..we can also save our children, our most important relationships and our communities.”
So he seems to be some sort of health influencer and is a life coach. Nothing wrong with that. This blog piece isn’t about the person who wrote the meme, but the meme itself.
When writing out memes, or in this case, meme quotes, there seems to be some sort of formula that must be followed
1. It must be interesting and just complicated enough, or scientific enough, to make the user feel he is learning something by reading it. I didn’t know about the MHz frequencies of healthy humans, the frequency of decayed life and the frequency of death as the meme just taught me. I am now sufficiently drawn in, educated and fascinated for I have learned something new and that makes me feel special and informed.
2. An individual must be named to give the previous statement some weight. In this case, a famous scientist is referenced. It must be true because a scientist is named.
3. The meme itself must be visually easy on the eyes. In this case it’s on a black background with white block lettering which can translate across every spectrum of vision levels. It’s not visually noisy, I don’t have to squint, it doesn’t compete with any other imagery to distract me. The meme and its message has my full attention. The chosen colors: black and white convey the seriousness of the message itself.
4. Now that you’ve been sufficiently drawn in with new scientific knowledge and interesting facts (the MHz levels of life and death), you can get to the heart and meaning of the meme. In this case, the heart of the meme is to speak out against coffee and the evil machinations behind coffee shops.
5. Rather than just rail against coffee and their pushers, coffee shops, you incorporate your expert’s analysis along with your original fact and communicate to users a clear and present danger. In this case drinking coffee is a clear and present danger.
6. The last thing you do is create panic, alarm and mistrust in your user by using a real-life example, something pretty innocuous that we all see almost every day, and turn it into a threat. In this case the normal thing is a corner coffee shop. The panicked user is now triggered: every time he passes a corner coffee shop, he will feel superior in his knowledge that corner coffee shops are a clear and present danger to all life, for coffee reduces life.
I feel now would be a good time to reiterate that this post isn’t about whether coffee is good or bad for you.
This post is about how user’s choices are being manipulated and their sense of autonomous thought and even their decision making skills has transcended beyond their own self-guided behavior and has been reduced to being influenced by a meme.
When I first read the meme, I was puzzled. It didn’t seem to track with my experience, or my experiential knowledge, which is to say my personal experience didn’t seem to match the meme’s warnings.
My husband has been drinking daily cups of coffee since he was a teenager. He is not overweight, he is a swimmer, a cyclist, was over 30 years a vegetarian, but recently became a carnivore, is a musician, a gardener and has decorated our home impeccably. He is really smart and has a brain packed with all sorts of vast knowledge about everything in life. Children and animals seem to be drawn to him. He is not bad looking and he has been drinking at least two cups of coffee every single day of his life for almost 50 years. He is smart, in very good health and I’m sure if he could test his MHz levels, they’d be off the charts.
I, on the other hand, have a different metabolism than he does and I have an autoimmune disease which causes my body to suffer severe inflammation. I was diagnosed at age 7 and although I can drink coffee, I must do it in moderation or my body might not feel so great after being overly caffeinated and this could be bad for my overall well-being.
The idea that the meme seems to cut out all personal and individual responses to coffee is troubling. Each individual should assess their own reaction to coffee. I know people who have never had a cup of coffee in their life and they would probably have a very adverse reaction to coffee if they were to try it for the first time. But that being said, this meme feels as if it’s making a sweeping generalization and diagnosis that may conflict with experiential knowledge of individuals.
Have humans lost the capacity to remind themselves of who they are? Can they even recall their experiences with coffee, or coffee at coffee shops with friends, coworkers or even by themselves? And why the sudden idea that coffee is bad? Like the proles in “1984”, is this meme trying to tell us that coffee will only be for the privileged and not the rest of us? Has social media and the memeifying of our decision making processes somehow cudgeled out our own personal decisions and replaced them with a behaviorally generated digital recommendation, or meme, to hate coffee? If so, why? Why are we supposed to despise coffee now?
Outside of co-opting individual decision making processes, the meme, whether it realizes it or not is inching into territory that has been discussed for years among scholars, architects, city planners, sociologists and even people like me, armchair analyzers of the world.
It’s the idea of the necessity of the Third Space. The Third Space is the space that is outside your home and outside your work. The most obvious example of a Third Space is a coffee shop. Third Spaces can be community halls, churches or some sort of public meeting space. But the coffee shop, or the cafe, is what most people think of when they think of the term Third Space. In light of the rise of remote work where the First Space (the Home) and the Second Space, (the Office or WorkSpace) has become one, there is an even more urgent need for Third Spaces than ever before.
The idea that the meme would encourage suspicion of a coffee shop on every corner in our community left me troubled and questioning if the meme really had the intentions behind it it claims.
In an age where Freedom seems to be the central talking point in every conversation and Freedom of choice over our own bodies and our children’s bodies seems to be the focal discussion, Freedom of movement feels overlooked. The Freedom to move your body into different spaces without fear of retribution, and especially the Freedom to wander into the Third Spaces, needs to be brought back into the center of the conversation especially in light of this meme which seems to want to take away the Third Space.
When I was living by myself as a young woman in San Francisco my weekends were filled with wandering in and out of Third Spaces. Coffee shops and cafes in San Francisco in the 1990’s were where I found the joy in life after a week of work. I would have breakfast at one cafe, then take a nice long walk in the park, then I would head out of the park into a neighborhood and within a block or two would stumble upon another cafe and settle in for a cup of strong, black coffee to motivate the long walk home.
There is no greater joy in life than feeling life itself buzz around you when entering in and settling into a Third Space. You will invariably meet people, have brief conversations with them and these are little vignettes of your life that forever shape your world view and your character. You feel the electricity in the air of life itself: human interaction. Back before laptops and smart phones were a thing, you felt it even more acutely.
After all, I met my husband at a Third Space. It wasn’t a coffee shop. But it was a gathering space where people go, they meet, they listen to music, have events, drink beverages -alcoholic or non-alcoholic-if they choose, have food delivered in and enjoy each other’s company. I often wonder what would have become of my life if I had decided not to attend that Third Space event that night in 2012.
Last but not least, whether people want to admit it or not, we live in the modern age and most renters and most new home owners have become accustomed to an urban lifestyle. One of the criteria for buying our home on the Gulf Coast, for example, was what the walking score was to the nearest Third Space. There are two or three local cafes within a 15-20 minute walk from our front door. This certainly informed our decision to move forward with the purchase of the home. And for what it’s worth, this is the criteria for many: how far of a walk or bike ride is it to the nearest cafe?
If the meme were to have its way then all coffee shops would go away, and by doing so it seems would hopefully reduce an individual’s coffee intake, according to the meme. This taking away of Third Space and coffee somehow equals life is really what the meme is saying. But I look at this outcome as death. The death of the Third Space would be the death of hope, the death of gathering, the death of ideas, the death of touch, the death of that necessary interaction with other humans, the death of socialization, the death of meeting someone possibly for the first time, having chemistry and maybe even marrying them. Without the Third Space there is the death of possibility. When possibility is removed from the human experience, then all reason for living seems to fracture and turn to dust.
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