The Joker Room

— The Emotional Resilience that the New Generations Don’t Have

You’re not special. You are not a unique and beautiful snowflake. You are organic matter, decomposing as anyone else.” this was part of Tyler Durden’s training in the Fight Club. Seventeen years after the film was released the term “snowflake” is defined by the Guardian as the Insult of the Year, used to describe the emotional lack of self-confidence of new generations. But Lies Notebaert from Western Australia’s School of Psychological Science claims: “New generations don’t lack self-confidence, they are simply less equipped to deal with negative emotions”.

Resilience is an answer to a sort of anxiety. Our world got better under many points of view, but there are new forms of adversity, as social media violence or cyberbullying, that leave us emotionally unprepared. In the current university system, what is at stake is high, and the fear for failure is crucial. Professor Notebaert concludes “I’d like to start a challenge in which all my students fail, to then give them a second chance to apply all that they learnt from failure.”

— The Wine that Celebrates the International Day of Lies

To go with, and also to forget, Brexit Day, an international group of creatives launched Liar. A white Merlot, obtained from black grapes. A product with a misleading image, just like Brexit.

“2018 was a year full of lies. We let people tell us that Global Warming doesn’t exist, that migrants steal our jobs, that the UK pays 350 million pounds every week to the EU and that Brexit would have been easy.

That same year we created a wine obtained from the black grapes of Merlot. Is it really a white wine?” this is what we read on this wine’s label.

And this incitement makes us think. And also let us drink it up with some irony and disrespectful creativity. Should we treat it as white wine for its colour or red for its grapes? Each of us can choose what to believe and what to drink it to. “In Vino Veritas”,  even when the wine is called Liar.

— How Consumers’ Fear Benefits Brands

Fomo, the Fear Of Missing Out. That’s the fear of missing good bargains while surfing the web. Marketing divisions of many companies decided to base whole adv campaigns on this sense for urgency, spread especially among digital natives.

“Other users are visiting this structure” or “a user has just booked a room” or “only one place left” are the warnings that constantly appear during our search for a holiday stay.

Somebody remains untouched by pushing and doesn’t get anxious, but research carried out for Eventbrite.com showed that 69% of Millennials experienced FOMO, buying impulsively, often rushed and hurried.

Booking, Ryanair, EasyJet, but even Amazon, E-bay, and Wish know all this very well. Because missing a Black Friday or a Cyber Monday in 2020 is considered an actual phobia.