The top 0.95%

Challenge Day 13: If you go here you can read about this challenge and all of this will make more sense.

Video of the day - Rory Sutherland: Life lessons from an ad man [Go here to watch the video on ted.com]

Thumbnail quote - "Engineers, medical people, scientific people, have an obsession with solving the problems of reality, when actually … once you reach a basic level of wealth in society, most problems are actually problems of perception.” (Rory Sutherland)

Why I chose this video - I clicked on the category "funny" because I'm having a trying sort of day. Life lessons from somebody who works in advertising seemed like it could be fun ...?

Summary - Rory Sutherland mainly discusses how perception changes everything. Take, for example, the hilarious and brilliant campaign for "New Diamond Shreddies". It was funny, and it made people laugh. And ridiculously, it worked. By making people believe that something was new about Shreddies (while, in truth, we all know they're the same thing) people were newly excited about their high-fiber cereal.
He talks about how Frederick the Great of Prussia (modern day Germany) wanted his people to eat potatoes. He first tried by making their growth and consumption compulsory, and it failed utterly. In a stroke of brilliance, he passed a law saying that potatoes were a royal food, to be grown and consumed only by the royal family. The purposely badly guarded royal potato patch was robbed constantly and potatoes became a very common food among all classes. Genius.
With many more examples, and even more jokes, he gets to his point. We can replace tangible incentive with intangible value. Instead of keeping material and physical objects as the marker of success and happiness, it is possible to create social pressures that encourage more egalitarian societies. Moving away from constantly needing more and more, we can place a higher value on the things that already exist.

My Take-Away -Well, this all made sense to me. I especially enjoyed watching the audience see the Shreddies marketing campaign for the first time. As a Canadian, this was not news to me - the commercials were all over the television and I thought they were very funny. But this audience was mostly not from anywhere that Shreddies are sold and they were in hysterics watching this ad campaign that was based completely on the idea that perception changes everything.
I am certainly on board with the idea of trying to keep things in perspective. This isn't to say that I am immune to Western advertising and Hollywood's work to tell me I need more and bigger things. However, I do try to keep it in perspective.
That whole movement of "we are the the 99%" in the Western world frustrated me all to hell. Sure, yes, we are the 99% in the Western part of the world. But globally? Sorry, people, we are the top 2%, if even that low. If you have food, shelter, clean water, and access to health care, you are right up there. I went onto a website to calculate how I compare financially from a global perspective: I am in the top 0.95% richest people in the world. Wow. Talk about perspective. Go to this website to calculate where you stand compared to the other 6,999,999,999 people on this planet. It's an illuminating activity. But it doesn't even count some of the most amazing blessings I rely on every day.
I live in Canada. I have the same rights as a man. I have a good family, many friends, loads of opportunities, an excellent education, a house, food, clean water, a bank account, a birth certificate and government-issued identification, a passport, and a zillion other things. I can see a doctor if I get sick, hire a lawyer if I have legal issues, and vote for my government. My home is safe - I have never even heard a gunshot or felt the quake of a bomb. So although I have student debt, need things like a new car, have to pay rent, and other such financial stressors, I'm lucky to even have to worry about those things.