In 1831, the 24-year-old philosopher and political economist John Stuart Mill penned a series of five articles in the Examiner newspaper in which he argued that English society was then in an “age of transition”. His particular concern was with the prevailing system of political, economic and moral beliefs and ideas which had become “unsuited to the present state of society and the human mind”. He claimed that “mankind had outgrown old institutions and old doctrines and … not yet acquired new ones” and that there were “anomalies … characteristic of the transition from a system of opinions which had worn out, to another only in the process of being formed”.
Prior to Mill’s polemic on the lagging ideas and thoughts constituting his “spirit of the age (sic)”, the phrase Age of Transitiondescribed the emergence of a new romantic tradition in European art, literature, music and architecture in the second half of the 18th Century. In this tradition, works that expressed man’s position within nature, his feelings and emotions, and a greater sympathy with the poor began to replace those of the prior classical tradition with its enlightenment emphasis on regularity, clarity, order, and the supremacy of reason.
Having features of both these periods, I argue we are living through our own Age of Transition, right now. Just as Mills identified, I propose that our dominant modes and systems of thought in relation to lived or real experience, its conditions, knowing and creation are lagging fundamental changes underway in most Western societies and economies. As in Romanticism, these transitions can be expressed in the emergence of changes in human desire, of growing awareness of our position within nature, and of their enablement by new modes of organisation and technologies of their creation, intermediation and often diminishment.
In our emerging post-pandemic era, I identify five themes that together define the primary experience transitions of our current age. These are: 1) The released pent-up desire for greater fulfilment and wellbeing, 2) the emboldened search for self-expression and personal identity, 3) the rise of more-than-human interactional embodied creation, 4) the rapid growth in remote work, care and other services and organisations, and 5) new forms of emergent hidden inequalities in real experience. Next, I briefly explain each.
The released pent-up desire for greater fulfilment and wellbeing
Both during and after the pandemic, many people sought to make positive, lasting differences in their everyday lives. For millions of working adults, Covid-19 catalysed a desire to leave unfulfilling jobs, pursue a better work-life balance and attain greater wellbeing. Dubbed The Great Resignation, over 47 million Americans voluntarily quit their jobs in 2021 – a record number [1]. Similarly, in the UK, a recent survey revealed that 1 in 5 employees planned to change their jobs in 2022 for similar reasons [2]. Data of spend on wellness technologies and services suggests we are now firmly in an era of wellbeing or wellness creation [3]. People are seemingly more compelled and even feel more obligated to “optimise” their mental health and wellness (distinctly from the optimisation of their physical health or fitness of their body). Employers too are increasingly expected to nurture their staff’s wellbeing by providing the time, space, facilities, and technologies to support their efforts.
The emboldened search for self-expression and personal identity
Beyond work, we continue to see a growth in individual self-expression, especially amongst the younger generation (and often by their parents too - with some embarrassing results!). Confined to the home, out of physical contact with friends and enabled by social media platforms such as TikTok, covid-bound Gen Z (aged 6-24) were heads down in their screens, manipulating, experimenting and exploring their sense of self, and producing and sharing content. In a different form of expression, the pandemic has emboldened many (especially younger) people to express their gender identity more confidently and openly too [4].
In contrast to younger people, the older generation’s experience of the pandemic and post-pandemic has afforded far fewer opportunities for thoughtful creative expression and emancipation. According to research, elderly people felt less important and valued - disposable even - during the pandemic due to social isolation, ageism (especially in the mainstream media), gaps in the provision of care, and seemingly economically focused lockdown positions that disrespected their value, worth, and merits.
Whether working or not, young or old, the (post-)pandemic era is characterised by mixed experiences of transitions in wellbeing, creative and personal expression, and a sense of being valued. Whilst some established social and cultural identities, categories, habits, and practices are now being questioned and (slowly) remade, others have remained stuck or even gone backwards.
The rise of more-than-human interactional embodied minds
Driven by more available, better connected and performing personal digital technologies [5], the third theme is the rapid rise of the more-than-human interactional embodied experience. Here, the materiality of devices (silicon, glass, rubber, etc.) and the bits of data they exchange are melding into the biology of our bodies and the flow of our conscious experience. Now, many people’s everyday sensing, cognition, memory-recall, evaluations, decisions and actions are more pervasively intermediated by advanced wearable and handheld devices. Actual real experience is transcending dualisms of mind and body, physical and virtual space, and even space and time. As more-than-human interactional beings, the ways we experience the world and place, how we learn, educate, socialise, work, care, and even parent are being upended; formerly stable and discrete structures of institutions, family, community, nature, society, and even nationhood are dissolving as people become more immersed in increasingly digitally intermediated worlds.
The rapid growth in remote care and other services
A fourth related theme defining the present Age of Transition is the rapid expansion of more remote ways of working, organising, connecting and delivery of formerly physical, human-performed and centrally situated services. Spanning social, work, customer, care, B2B, government and education contexts, the pandemic has ushered in an accelerated wave of investments that are distributing and decentralizing value-creation, offerings, communication, information-sharing and service propositions and models [6]. Throughout the 2020s we can expect further funding and ongoing innovation in technologies that facilitate hybrid work and care environments and automated remote service delivery. One consequence is the parallel rise in employee, patient and citizen surveillance or monitoring, and related issues of trust, privacy and civil liberties infringements.
New forms of emergent hidden inequalities in real experience
In any age of transition, change is not experienced equally. For many, the possibilities of wellbeing, work and life fulfilment, self-expression, more-than-human experience, and remote work and service delivery and engagement are not even known let alone accessible. In fact, in my summaries of the four themes above, I have deliberately painted a mostly positive picture of the present transition. Whilst the pandemic has magnified pre-pandemic disparities along categorical racial, gender, class and urban-rural divides, many more hidden forms of inequalities are now emerging. Importantly, these new disparities have newer origins and consequences too. There are many but they all arise in and, in some cases, cut across the four primary themes of transition outlined above. Significantly, few can be seen and captured readily using empirical analytic methods of observing, categorising and measuring inequalities. Instead, they are hidden in diverse everyday contexts of real or lived experience and are difficult to determine. In the lists below, for each of the four themes I provide examples of these “non-empirical” experienced contexts producing new inequalities.
Example contexts forming real experiences of more hidden inequalities arising in the four Age of Transition themes
THEME 1: The released pent-up desire for greater fulfilment and wellbeing
Inequalities in experience of wellbeing and the potential for wellbeing arising from:
Family care dependencies (time, activities) prohibit a capacity and potential for mental wellbeing
Existing chronic physical disease prohibits a capacity and potential for mental wellbeing too
Workplace pressures and time burdens limit potential for wellbeing
Incapacity to change or leave a present job
Need to hold down multiple jobs to scrape by
Workplace wellbeing is more corporate, white-collar, and confined to larger businesses and organisations
Employer insurance exclusions for certain pre-existing illnesses
Stigmatisation of e.g., obese or disabled persons in workplace programs
The corrupting idea of the optimum, perfect employee and its non-attainment
Exploitation of programs or their non-participation by uncaring employers
Abuse of personal body and wellbeing data by employers for nefarious means
Poorly designed team wellbeing incentives
THEME 2: The emboldened search for self-expression and personal identity
Inequalities in experience of self-expression, creativity and personal identity arising from:
Online abuse and lack of online protections that limit self-expression
Bullying, discrimination, and harassment of those who desire to express themselves against the norm
Lack of human rights protections for virtual and real-world gender-based and other expression
Overreach of youth mental illness diagnoses
Ease of medicalisation of youth and adult mental problems
Lack of means to access or use digital means of expression
Covid-hangover feelings of exclusion amongst elderly populations
THEME 3: The rise of more-than-human interactional embodied minds
Inequalities in actual and potential more-than-human embodied interactions arising from:
Manipulation of public perception and emotion via online disinformation
Technology-device dependency
Withdrawal or “displacement” from place and space
App measurement dependency (e.g., attachment to measures of wellbeing performance)
Lack of access to and affordability of devices
Discriminatory pricing of digital media plans for poorer persons
Lack of financial services / banking system limiting access to digital payment and other services
Requires even more tech and digital savviness (designer-designed apps and devices in the mould of the designer)
Ethnicity biases in artificial intelligence algorithms and facial recognition systems
Privacy erosion and risk of data theft
Authoritarian states expand activities of personal device surveillance
Disenfranchisement from political voting due to need for personal digital identities
THEME 4: The rapid growth in remote working, care and other services
Inequalities in experience of remote working, care and other services arising from:
Employee surveillance and penalties
Exclusions to remote care services
Lack of patient digital capacities
Lack of broadband / digital network infrastructure in the home and in rural areas
Lack of space in the home to work
Loss of services in local communities and centres that were essential for older and poorer persons
Loss of work to machines and automation
Employers reduce hours and shift to gig economy, nomadic workers
Employees must pay for own homeworking equipment, excluding many from participation
Diminished in-person service contact will constrict real world service systems and lead to a loss of social connections
More disintegration / division of social and ethnic groups in cities
Concentration of corporate power into larger firms as limits of economies of scale of physical space co-working are lifted
Critically, all the above can diminish wellbeing and increase the risk of mental illness and physical disease. Many produce multiplying effects in real experience. I shall return to examine these inequalities in more detail later in the paper.
THE REAL EXPERIENCE THINKING GAP
Just as J.S. Mill argued in his polemic on the inadequacies of prevailing doctrines to know and respond to the political, economic and societal transitions of his time, I suggest that the current Age of Transition is also characterised by a similar mismatch. In an age of accelerated change and widening divergence of experience, largely driven by rapid personal, corporate and service digital intermediation, I argue, like Mill, that we too must reflect on the explanatory powers of our dominant logic of experience and its design-creation. In this paper, I offer just such a reflection. I explain the limitations of current modes of thought and describe their practical consequences. Following my review of these shortcomings, I offer an alternative model, one I will argue is better suited to an era defined by a pandemic induced desire for wellbeing, more-than-human embodied experience, distributed remote service and monitoring, and hidden emerging inequalities. After introducing this model using examples - a model I call Assemblages of Real Experience (or AREX) - I will conclude by outlining its implications for health and social systems, research, policy, innovation, organisation, practice, design and (e)valuation …
... to be continued.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/03/the-great-resignation-is-still-red-hot-but-may-not-last.html
[2] https://www.pwc.co.uk/press-room/press-releases/pwc-workforce-survey-20221.html
[3] The Global Wellness Institute forecasts the global mental wellness market to be worth c $200 bn and the workplace wellness market c $50 bn. The mental wellness market is defined as consumer spending on activities, products and services whose primary aim is to help people along the mental wellness pathways of growth and nourishment and rest and rejuvenation. It encompasses four subsectors: self-improvement; brain-boosting nutraceutical and botanicals; meditation and mindfulness; and senses, spaces, and sleep. The Workplace Wellness market includes expenditures on programs, services, activities, and equipment by employers aimed at improving their employees’ health and wellness. These expenditures aim to raise awareness, provide education, and offer incentives that address specific health risk factors and behaviours (e.g., lack of exercise, poor eating habits, stress, obesity, smoking) and encourage employees to adopt healthier lifestyles. https://globalwellnessinstitute.org/what-is-wellness/what-is-the-wellness-economy/
[4] https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-gender-expression-5187952
[5] The number of wearable devices is forecast to exceed 1 bn in 2022. https://www.statista.com/statistics/487291/global-connected-wearable-devices/
[6] https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/how-covid-19-has-pushed-companies-over-the-technology-tipping-point-and-transformed-business-forever