In Tim Ferris’s book, The Four Hour Work Week, he discusses a concept called “Geographic Arbitrage”, or Geo-arbitrage. In a nutshell, the concept explains how you can achieve a significant real-terms increase in your earnings by being paid in one currency, say US dollars, but spending that money on goods and services from a much cheaper foreign country. The concept has become more and more realistic in recent years as advances in technology mean it’s possible to work from anywhere in the world with a laptop, a mobile and a broadband connection.

Sure, it wouldn’t work for everyone – if you work in a shop or have to manage people in an office then you’ll struggle to do that from a South American beach. But if your work primarily involves computers, telephones or “creativity” – if you’re, say, a writer – then it’s ideal.

But what if you took the idea further? If rather than renting or buying a house somewhere cheap, you didn’t have a house at all? What sort of possibilities would that level of mobility allow? What if you really, really embraced technology – living in hotels and short term rental apartments and making your travel plans at the very, very last minute using hotel and flight comparison sites and online currency data. Using services like Dopplr and Twitter to find out where your friends would be each month to help you decide where to go next; using Skype to stay constantly in touch and Boingo to ensure that you had access to wireless almost –almost - everywhere you went. What, in other words, if you lived as a technomad?

There was only one way to find out. Less than a month later, I had sold almost everything I owned – my furniture, most of my clothes, my DVD collection, the guitar I’d never learned to play – everything, basically, that wouldn’t fit into a small suitcase on wheels. And I’d used the money to buy a plane ticket to New York to begin a ridiculous experiment. To see if it was possible to enjoy a ridiculously high standard of living on the road, at absolutely no extra cost, simply by embracing spontaneity and putting my faith in the power of technology. What I couldn’t possibly have predicted at the time is that it’s not only possible, but massively preferable. The adventures I had since February – more on them soon – are such that I literally do not understand why people who are able to work remotely, and who don’t have a spouse or children to worry about, don’t buy themselves a suitcase and hit the road.

Anyways, here’s the thing that caught my attention: The debut episode (of “The Style Series, presented by Diet Coke”) includes “the exclusive premiere of Rihanna’s new e-film for Gucci.”

So, let’s just get this straight. One of the featured guests on the branded entertainment post-TV program was there to tell us about her latest post-TV branded-entertainment deal?

Maybe there’s a clue in here of what Leno’s new show ought to be, or what the future of talk shows in general might look like: How about a branded show that is exclusively devoted to the touting and discussion of the latest exciting new developments in branded entertainment? Instead of stars flacking their new movies, they’ll simply discuss their latest endorsements. Indie directors will premiere the latest commercial work they’re doing to pay the bills. Reality-show stars will talk about products placed in whatever series has made them “famous.” And so on.

Very exciting to live in the “post-advertising era,” no?

As the financial crisis snowballed this year, retail sales fell sharply, and government figures showed the first across-the-board decline in consumer spending since 1991. Curiously, many assessments of this development treated it as an exciting new trend — and maybe even an overnight realignment of where and how Americans find meaning and satisfaction in life. The lower-spending shopper of 2008 was promptly cited as evidence of a “new frugality” or a “saving is cool” mentality. “It’s a whole new reassessment of values,” one commentator suggested, while another posited that “America’s love affair with shopping” may be over.

Yeah? That seems like a lot to infer from data points in a government report, particularly when it suggests that yesterday we were vacuous shopping-bots and today we are virtuously sober citizens. At this stage, the evident hesitation to spend seems more like a function of fear than of frugality. Consumers, spooked by reports of declining spending, are deciding not to spend.

 This year’s Black Friday big-box mobs hint that perhaps bargain binges and postmaterialist values aren’t the same thing. If there’s a deeper shift in our thinking, it’s still to come. And maybe it will. After all, the mere fact that we have managed to characterize consumer shock as frugality chic offers a perverse form of hope: That whatever happens, we’ll never lose our tendency toward optimism — even, it turns out, about our pessimism.

You can see the other videos at the Interesting New York website.

Inspired by the TED conference, David organized the first Mandala NYC event in August with the intent to kick off meaningful conversations about ideas that matter in an informal, accessible, and affordable setting. Since then, David has hosted an impressive list of speakers (August, September and October) and created a small but engaged community of regular attendees. David’s next event, under its new branding — Lucid NYC — is on 20th November and, if you are in NYC, you must not miss it.

At yesterday’s well attended event, my fellow speakers were relationship coach Michael Jascz, artist Steven Hirsch (do check out his Courthouse Confessions project) and green energy enthusiast Jonathan Colby.

I once again used my story about little girls who own a hundred dolls to explain my off consumption experiment to the audience and the story is becoming a sure hit with women at conferences –

Here’s the video of the presentation –

– and here’s the slideshow –

By the way, my belief in serendipity was reinforced when David invited me to speak at the event on a day when I was attending another event in NYC — The Feast Social Innovation Conference. I should attend conferences in NYC more often; every time I’m visiting NYC to attend a conference, I’m asked to speak at one.

1. Delete 120 minutes a day of ’spare time’ from your life. This can include TV, reading the newspaper, commuting, wasting time in social networks and meetings. Up to you.

2. Spend the 120 minutes doing this instead:

- Exercise for thirty minutes.
- Read relevant non-fiction.
- Send three thank you notes.
- Learn new digital techniques.
- Volunteer.
- Blog for five minutes about something you learned.
- Give a speech once a month about something you don’t currently know a lot about.

3. Spend at least one weekend day doing absolutely nothing but being with people you love.

4. Only spend money, for one year, on things you absolutely need to get by. Save the rest, relentlessly.

Almost eighteen months back, I decided to live my life more purposefully, when I made my 30-by-30 list. Since then, I have tried to live my life on the same back-to-the-basics principles that Seth writes about. It hasn’t always been easy, and I haven’t always managed to stay on course, but these simple changes have transformed my life.

So, go ahead, test it for yourself. It will be difficult, and it will take time, but, if you manage to do most of these things most of the time, I promise you that you’ll gift yourself a whole new life within a year.

An increasing number of consumers are rejecting their roles as consumers and refusing to define themselves by the things they buy. Instead, they are choosing to define their identities from the experiences they have, the relationships they build, and the meaning they create by expressing themselves creatively.

If you are a marketer, you can react to these trends in two ways. You can ignore them until they hit you, or you can immerse yourself in them, like I have chosen to.

After studying these trends for almost six months, I see that there is a way for brands to stay relevant, even if the seven social trends I talked about move closer to the mainstream.

Simplicity, authenticity and community are the three themes that run through the seven social trends that are changing consumption. Brands that help us clear the clutter in our lives, or enable us to have authentic experiences, or assist us in forming and connecting with communities will become the most important necessities, the only things we can’t do without.

I’m thankful to Drew for letting me share my thoughts with his readers.

Do head over to The Marketing Minute and participate in the conversation.

It’s really ironic that a subculture with a liberal/ anti-establishment/ anti-brand philosophy has transformed into become a an empty, recursive, self-referential focus group for marketers.

In Chapter 2 of ‘Hip: The History’, John Leland lays out the history of this connection between being hip and saying no to consumption —

Within hip’s juggernaut is a quest for the real, a belief that enlightenment involves stripping away sophistication, not adding it… Hip promises truth received, not constructed… This call to primitive experience resists (America’s) cult of progress. In place of status or achievement, the writers offer non-material values by which people could define themselves. This impetus — repeated by bohemians, beboppers, action painters, hippies, punks, hip-hoppers etc. — has been remarkably resilient over American history. Though we often think of these as discrete responses to the mainstream, they are really an ongoing part of what makes America American. They are not footnotes; they belong to the story. By our rebellions are we sometimes best known.

Consider Henry Thoreau, who removed himself from society, retreated to the countryside, and build a crude house in the woods around Walden Pond, the setting for his best-known book ‘Walden‘ –

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life… I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world.

Then, there is Walt Whitman, whose 1855 preface to ‘Leaves of Grass’ can stand as a “founding hipster manifesto” –

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence towards the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but n the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

Perhaps, like Thoreau and Whitman, I’m a hipster myself, even if I don’t look like one.

There are some really interesting stories in here, stories that tell me that I’m doing too little myself. I know one or two of these people, but I wish I had the time to know the rest of them before I left.

The Buck Stops Here

India may be in the throes of consumerism, but a growing number of young people are making a conscious effort to stay away from the high life.

By Riddi Shah, riddhi.shah@hindustantimes.com
Hindustan Times, Mumbai, Sunday, August 3, 2008

The rest of his business school buddies are busy reaching out for the next rung of the corporate ladder. But Kaushik Ramu, 27, has chosen to leave all that behind. “I was earning a lot of money without knowing why. It was just something that I had been indoctrinated with by my peers and parents. I was caught in a vicious spiral – buying things I didn’t need and selling products to others who didn’t need them either,” says the IIM-Bangalore graduate. So Ramu did what few others would have had the courage to: he walked. He walked out of the 9 to 5 life and into one in which there is no routine, no pressure to perform and no desire to consume. He has since moved to a small flat in Navi Mumbai and is finding ways to ‘simplify’ his life – from trying to cut out all personal con sumer goods in his life (think areetha and besan paste instead of Palmolive), to learning about sustainable living.

Surprisingly, Ramu isn’t alone in his disillusionment with India’s new materialist mantra. In fact, he’s part of a small but fast-growing commu nity of young people who are look ing to de clutter, de consume and de materialise their lives.

Like Naveen Vasudevan, 25, who identifies with Ramu’s compulsion to get away . “I was set on a career in technology.

My father died when I was young, so money was always a big motivating factor for me. But after more than two years working for a corporation, I decided that life can’t always be about profits,” says the former engineer. Two years ago, he moved from Chennai to Vellore and began volun teering at two farms in Auroville in Pondicherry .

“The more I live this life, the more I realise I can’t go back to the previous one. I wanted to give my family the good life, but now my definition of the good life has changed,” he says. The ‘good life’ for Vasudevan now means getting rid of his cellphone, eating locally produced food and buying only that which is absolutely necessary .

Others follow His decision to rebel against the norm has also inspired others to take similar life changes. “A friend who was pursuing a Master’s degree in Canada has decided to return home and work on a farm instead.

As has another friend studying in Australia,” says Vasudevan.

He adds, “More people are asking these questions today . They’ve realised that money, alcohol and the so-called ‘high life’ fail to bring real satisfaction. And now we have forums across the country so such people can find others like themselves”.

Twenty-seven-year-old former NGO employee and Baroda resident Jignasha Pandya agrees: “Most people are still leading a life of consumption. But I’m definitely meeting people who are looking for alternatives”. Pandya’s own journey into de consumption began more than four years ago. After going through a string of mean ingless jobs after college, she realised that the answer she was looking for was within herself.

“No job, no amount of money was making me happy . I worked in a newspaper and I saw how much manipulation there was; I worked for an NGO and realised that they were slaves to the corporations that funded them,” she says. Now Pandya holds workshops on sustainable living. “I once owned eight pairs of shoes. Now I wear one pair of chappals until they’re completely worn out,” she laughs.

“But I no longer feel like I’m giving up something. Whenever I go to a shop, I stop and ask myself, ‘Do I really need this?’ Most of the time, the answer is no,” she says.

Global Trend For these young people, the desire to step off the earn-buy-earn-buy treadmill is a new. But in the west, the ‘downshifting’ or ‘voluntary simplicity’ movement has been around for over a decade.

“The wealth in emerging nations like India and China is still pretty new. But there is a rebellious layer that is saying, let’s learn from the west,” says Tracey Smith, founder of the UK’s National Downshift ing Week (usually the last week of April during which people are encouraged to live ‘simply’). The movement’s popularity can be attributed to the power of the Internet, says Smith.

“It created a global consciousness. People were dissatisfied and found each other through the web,” she says. Her own website, www.nationaldownshiftingweek.com, has visitors from all over and eventually resulted in the creation of a National Downshifting Week in the US.

Another such website — www.storyofstuff.com — led Bangalore-based engineer Ganesh APP to think about his own consumption patterns. “It made me see that I didn’t need luxuries to be happy,” he says.

Ganesh, 21, has been ‘off consumption’ for the last two months.

“It’s such a liberating experience. You don’t have much to worry about. You don’t have five credit cards, two mobile phone plans, three insurance policies and property tax for lands and houses. And you don’t look at others to measure your suc cess,” he says. Soon, Ganesh will be backpacking around the country with nothing more than a thousand-rupee note. “You just learn to be content with whatever you have,” he says.

At 32, Vishal Jaiswal is more than 10 years Ganesh’s senior, but they have this philosophy in common: that sometimes, less is more. “I was working in the US during the dotcom boom and I had everything — an Audi, a great social life, a huge salary . But I got sacked and had to come back. I turned to yoga during my depression and found that it was my calling,” says the software engineer.

Today, four years down the line, Jaiswal stays away from all electricity, cooks his own food and washes his own utensils. His only indulgence? Comic books. “But I’m trying to get rid of that too,” he laughs.

Next week, India will celebrate its 61st birthday . And all around, there will be signs of India’s recently won economic ‘freedom’ – Nike showrooms, monolithic shopping malls and over—flowing wallets.

But young rebels like Ganesh, Ramu and Vasudevan will be the only reminders of an India that a dhoti-clad man once dreamt of. An India that had empowered its villages; an India that was meant to be simple, spiritual and self-sufficient. Gandhi’s India.

Answer: I’m moving to Washington DC for a year and I’m giving away almost everything I own to three five strangers.

Giving away my stuff, I have learned, is more, not less, work than moving it from one city to another or putting it in storage.

Moving, so far, has been a simple two step process –

- At the old house, I pack everything I need for two weeks into a bag or two to carry with myself and indiscriminately stuff everything else I own into boxes and load them into a truck.
- At the new house, I unload the boxes from the truck and transfer all my stuff straight into cupboards so that I don’t have to look at it again.

So far, I have never really had to worry about the stuff that’s in the boxes. I have never had to ask myself if I really needed it at all.

In every city I have stayed in, I have bought more stuff than I have discarded. As a result, every time I have moved, there is even more stuff in the boxes and even less incentive to sort through it.

This time, I need to sort through every single item I have acquired over the last ten years, to put them into three categories –

- Stuff I need to take with me (clothes/ accessories/ books/ gadgets/ important papers I can fit into three bags).
- Stuff I need to throw away (old papers/ other miscellaneous junk).
- Stuff I can give away (furniture/ furnishings/ electronics items/ kitchenware/ books/ DVDs/ knick-knacks).

The three people who are taking my things have already told me what they want. Others — both friends and strangers — keep dropping in to take the books/ DVDs/ knick-knacks that aren’t taken yet. So, there’s a constantly changing list of the stuff that I’m giving away, with additions as I sort through my stuff and find useful but forgotten things, and deletions as somebody asks for something.

By tomorrow evening, I have to sort through my stuff to identify what I’m taking with me and what I’m throwing away.

Then, I have to label whatever is left so the packers know if it is going to Alok/ Deepika in Thane, Preethi/ Gaurav in Chembur, Nandita in Pune or the orphanage in Madh.

The packers will be here on 5th and 6th to pack everything up and load it into two trucks — one each for Madh/ Thane and Chembur/ Pune — based on the route plan. On 7th, they’ll tell me how much it is going to cost me, after factoring in the octroi they have paid en route to Thane/ Pune.

It sounds like so much work that I haven’t even started so far — instead of sorting through my stuff, I have been researching the hipster subculture on the internet, for the last two days!

So, please don’t ask me again: but why do you need packers when you are giving everything away?