Substrate

It also got me thinking, if this is what a current soon-to-be retiree is doing and the precedent for every fifteen year-old with their own iPhone going forward…we’re screwed. I’m screwed if I think I can do good work, take in the world around me, hear myself think, focus on others, and be tied to reality all while having an incredibly addicting, noisy, and distracting ten icons available on my phone to explore at any impulse. List goes on and on…and we all use physical items (branded or not) to tell true, fake, complete, and incomplete stories about who we are or who we wish we are.

Fast forward to 2019. My lunch routine is a rotating cast of fast casual concepts, with lost vowel names ​ When I do go to a nearby deli, it’s impossible to ignore just how stark the socioeconomic contrast is to the Sweetgreen line. While the latter appears filled with people who stepped away from their WeWork desks, the former feels packed with the contractors underpaid to maintain that same WeWork. ​ We're no longer constrained to the Banana Republic-Gap-Old Navy trichotomy. Every facet of our daily consumer lives can now be hyper-segmented. ​ It's yet another area where technological know-how amplifies existing behaviors and practices. We've always signaled status with things like the little horse on your shirt or the expensive watch on your wrist (can you tell I worked in finance?) or the bag you carry or the shoes you wear. Those were social signaling table stakes. But now it's our lunch too. ​ Just next time you get lunch, take a good look around you. We are losing the spaces we share across socioeconomic strata. Slowly, but surely, we are building the means for an everyday urbanite to exist solely in their physical and digital class lanes. It used to be the rich, and then everyone else. Now in every realm of daily consumer life, we are able to efficiently separate ourselves into a publicly visible delineation of who belongs where. ​ But like in so many other areas of consumer life, we're slowly learning that mutually beneficial success at the micro-level just might have adverse effects in the macro.