Strands of Genius: Brands, Inflation & The High Cost of Living, Snoop Dogg x Planet Earth, The Originality Myth
Plus, our thoughts on: Fall & Compersion
WRITING FROM | Worcester Park, UK
WORKING ON | Fall/winter travel planning, learning how to compost
LOOKING AHEAD
Aug 27-Sept 15 | Worcester Park, UK
Sept 14-21 | Provence, FR
Oct 25-28 | Athens, Greece
Dec 1-7 | Nashville, TN
Dec 7-15 | Beersheba Springs, TN
Dec 15-19 | Atlanta, GA
Dec 19-21 | Athens, GA
Dec 21-Dec 31 | Nashville, TN
:: WHAT’S NEW & WEEKLY GRATITUDE ::
Using the last of the foraged blackberries, I made a crisp for the family BBQ and loads of blackberry jam. But now the temperatures are dropping, and going outside requires a coat or a blanket, and, well, it’s safe to say: WINTER IS COMING. I thought it was snowing earlier, but it turns out it’s actually 64F and it was just rain. But that’s where my head is, y’all! (And yeah, yeah, we know that in the Antipodes summer is just around the corner, and well.. we love that for you.)
As for us, we’re on our final few days in the UK, leaving on Thursday. There’s a small chance that we’ll return in October for a couple of nights, but it’s looking increasingly unlikely. It’s harder to leave than usual, even though we’ve spent less time in London proper. We’ve enjoyed getting to spend time hanging out with Faris’ dad, but it’s time to head to Provence for a wedding and then Toulouse to see friends! (**cues up Willie Nelson’s On The Road Again and slings her backpack over her shoulder**)
This week, we’re especially thankful for:
Matt, cheese, a brand new grill (and Matt and Faris’ patience in putting that together), the last of the blackberries, some refreshing rain, foraged rhubarb, a family end-of-summer BBQ, spicy bean dip, party queso, marmite & cheddar sausage rolls, pickle-brined fried chicken sammies, Lyndsey & Bex, Laith & Ramzi, Zak & Ariana, Berna & Makbola & Kamal & the rest of the Yakob extended family, baklava, The Pished Fish & YOU.
:: THE LINKS ::
THE ORIGINALITY MYTH & THE PERKS OF PHONING IT IN
Richard Truly shares his thoughts with “It’s Nice That” and we are particularly enamored with how he talks about originality: “Originality is a bourgeois parlour game. Getting salty about things looking like other things has to evolve. There are no new ideas, there never have been. There are only new ways of thinking about old ideas and how they’re stitched together. The problem we have is attribution. Or rather failing to attribute. Which, as a phenomenon, is fairly unique to our pocket of the creative world. Fashion allows itself to acknowledge ancestry. Music samples. True to the hall of mirrors that art “is”, entire bodies of work have been created celebrating appropriation. But not the “creative industry”. No. It might be something to do with the low self-esteem many in the advertising and design world have. A need to be liked generated from the fragility of the relationship between the buyer of work and the maker (“if they know we pinched it they won’t like us and work with us again”).” There’s loads of great stuff in the feature, including some stunning design work on top of his thinking. (It’s Nice That)
BRANDS, INFLATION & THE HIGH COST OF LIVING
When the British government announces “that they would be running an advertising campaign aimed at getting businesses to divert marketing spend into cutting prices in order to help mitigate the cost-of-living crisis,” what are brands to do? As Faris notes, “The most recent data suggests that 40% or more of households in the UK will experience fuel poverty this winter, which means choosing between food or heat for their families.” Will advertising solve brands problems when it comes to connecting with those consumers? Or are actions that redistribute corporate profits to those in need perhaps another way forward? (World Advertising Research Council)
PLIZZANET EARTH (FEAT: SNOOP DOGG)
In this hilarious recurring bit (from Jimmy Kimmel Live), Snoop Dogg narrates Planet Earth. It’s really fucking funny, y’all. Faris and I were cracking up watching this. (YouTube)
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:: WHAT WE’RE THINKING ABOUT: FALL & COMPERSION ::
We flew into London early May, and since then we’ve been to Portugal, Italy, New York, back to Portugal, Spain, in addition to spending some time in the suburbs. We’ve spent a third of our year in the UK and Europe, but this time with minimal time in London itself, and more time with Faris’ dad in Worcester Park.
When we first arrived in the UK, Faris’ dad gifted me an oversized fur coat, that used to be Faris’ mom’s before she passed. But pretty quickly, I found myself working from my swimsuit (yes really) and/or shorts and a sports bra, until eventually we decided to buy an air conditioning unit — which we hauled upstairs and downstairs every day for a period of a couple weeks. It was sweaty and glorious and at one point I even managed to get a very slight sunburn simply from reading my book in the back garden.
It was the driest summer on record in the UK, since the early 1900s. A few weeks ago it was 75F+ during the day (though a little cooler in the evening) and I was harvesting 1.5lbs of blackberries each day.
But now, the temps are dropping and the skies are gray and I’m reminded by how much the weather impacts my mood. It’s only September, but temperatures are already falling into the low 50s.
Oh how I wish I was someone that was excited by the fall. To enjoy sweaters, pumpkins and pumpkin spice lattes… To yearn for cool breezes and campfires… These are the things the internet tells me to get excited about, now that Fall is on the horizon.
To be fair, I don’t hate fall in the same way I hate winter. I feel about fall as I feel about pizza: It’s fine, but I like it more the less I’m exposed to it. (Two pizza slices a year is plenty for me.) If we had only a couple of days of fall scattered throughout a 6 month summer, that would be bearable — maybe even desirable. (Faris note: NYC has approx one week of spring and one week of fall ;)) But of course there’s the fact that Fall leads to Winter. Knowing it’s the start of months and months of increasingly colder temperatures… It’s a huge bummer.
While people tell me to simply wear more clothes, it just doesn’t work that way for me. I’ve got Raynaud’s syndrome and that means I can be wearing two pairs of leggings, two pairs of wool socks, a tank, a sweater, a down coat, a hat, and fingerless gloves all while **inside** and still feel cold, still lack circulation in my feet.
[I going to write a nice line about Winter here, because when giving feedback, it’s always a good idea to sprinkle some positive stuff in there along with the criticism —but after staring at my computer for full length of a song, I decided that it’s not for me to defend these cold seasons.]
Instead, there’s really only one attitude adjustment that helps me deal with the cold. It’s called compersion.
And it’s when I remind myself that some of my favorite people in life (Faris, my mom, my bestie Lauren, to name a few) enjoy and appreciate the cold. They live for the days of temperatures dropping. My mom sets her thermostat at 68F/20C and still occasionally complains about how hot it is inside her igloo house.
So what’s compersion then?!
Compersion is our wholehearted participation in the happiness of others. It is the sympathetic joy we feel for somebody else, even when their positive experience does not involve or benefit us directly. Thus, compersion can be thought of as the opposite of jealousy.
No, this is not an article about polyamory, but apparently the term is more familiar amongst people who practice polyamory. “The term compersion was coined and defined in the early 1990s by the Kerista community, a San Francisco-based polyamorous group that has since disbanded, as the feeling of taking joy in the joy that others you love share among themselves,” writes Dr. Marie Thouin Savard in her dissertation.
The term may have been coined by polyamorists, but the concept goes back to the Buddha. Mudita, or sympathetic joy, is one of the four qualities for enlightenment.
And yet, usually when empathy is studied, researchers are looking at the ability for humans to understand the negative variety. Pttinsky and Montoya researched empathetic joy and during their research realized that prior “research on empathy focuses almost exclusively on its negative variety, empathic sorrow, either by defining empathy as a state involving negative emotions or by confining its empirical study to the negative.” To make matters more complicated, there’s also the negativity bias (the fact that we give weight to negative information more than positive) and equally the fact that the human brain tends to react more intensely to distress and sadness rather than happiness.
Discomfort stems from being physically cold, but it also stems mentally from knowing that I’ll feel the discomfort for months and months and months rather than just a few days. My brain can — and will — loop on those two elements of discomfort.
But, I’m somehow able to hack that negative loop when I remind myself that Faris, and Lauren, and my mom are living their best lives at these (ahem miserable!) temperatures. I touch Faris’ skin and feel his warmth despite the cold. I remind myself the discomfort he feels in extreme heat, and try to soak up all the good vibes he feels in cooler temperatures. I think about Lauren in one of her cute winter beanies, with a pom pom at the top, and imagine her sitting on her back porch reading a book and stoking a fire. I think about my mom increasing the length of her walk when temperatures drop, and imagine all the adventures she’s having.
And something happens when I start imagining those things. Usually it starts with the corners of my mouth turning up ever so slightly. And then that small smile tricks my brain into thinking I’m happy. And even though it starts as an act of pretending, somehow my brain and body don’t care?? As in, even though I’m me, and I know I’m pretending or rather imagining things, there’s still a positive benefit that I truly do feel.
Don’t get me wrong, I still get worked up when it drops below 76F/24C. We retrieved the bins from the collection point at the end of the driveway this morning and the entire time I thought about how I should have put on a coat. But even writing about friends and family appreciating colder temperatures, I feel like my attitude has shifted.
Oh, and the news tells me not to worry, that this is only a “False Fall” anyway, and that we’ll be back to the hotter temperatures in no time ;)
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It's called Genius Steals because we believe ideas are new combinations and that nothing can come from nothing. But copying is lazy. We believe the best way to innovate is to look at the best of that which came before and combine those elements into new solutions.
Co-Founders Faris & Rosie are award-winning strategists and creative directors, writers, consultants and public speakers who have been living on the road/runway since March 2013, working with companies all over the world. Our Director of Operations is nomadic like us, our accounting team is based in Tennessee where our company is registered, our admin extraordinaire is based in Playa del Carmen, and our collaborators are all over the world. Being nomadic allows us to go wherever clients need us to be, and to be inspired by the world in between.
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