Soundbyte Psychology

While working at a certain fruity company, I remember the effect it had on me when I saw an entire cluster of plants literally killing themselves to reach the little amount of sunlight that reached them during the winter day. They stretched so far towards the light that they were uprooting themselves. One had already lost too much rooting and fallen. Some of the plants were reaching over other ones and likely blocked out light to those, but they were killing themselves over this limited resource of light. Then, looking out onto the field, I saw a single tree out in the light. It had grown into an almost perfect half-circle, completely balanced. It had non-finite resources and no competition. It was whole.

You’ve been at the fair for some time now. You’ve ridden the rides, laughed with your friends and had more than a bit too much funnel cake. In fact, you likely shouldn’t have shared that cotton candy with your friends. You can feel it. The heat of the day and the rides has worn on you. You’re ready to leave. . except there is that one friend who wants to stay (isn’t there always). Your desire to leave is less than their desire to stay, so you stay. Day drags towards night. You feel you could almost pass out, or throw up, or whichever comes first. Then it happens. The sun begins to set. The sky colors and it seems the sound of those throughout the fair quiets ever so slightly as if you are not the only one to notice the sunset. Finally, as the light has fled almost entirely, lights begin to turn on in explosions as the rides, booths and games of the fair are all lit in explosions. They color the air itself in this moment between day and night, so that it is almost surreal. It is still the same fair that you couldn’t stand for the past few hours, but it isn’t. It’s transformed. You feel energized, charged – dare I say ‘enchanted’? You can’t believe that just minutes ago you felt like dying. You feel like you could stay up all night in this new wonderland all around you. Your own laughter grows louder, more energetic, joining the raised volume of those around you as nightfall is assured. This is the moment that changes everything. The moment in between one world and next. The moment in mixing when one song becomes another.

You didn’t think I was really talking about the fair, did you?

‘If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.’ Or so goes the saying. This is especially true in corporate franchises, which create clones of stores for their customers. A new opening is just more of the same, except that it has now taken that space in existence and filled it with something that is not new at all. This is how the world becomes smaller, when the finite space of the world is filled, more and more, with ‘just more of the same’. This danger comes at a cost of losing the world itself, until only uniformity with less variety remains. Shop independent.

You’re in a restaurant. Why are you there? You’re a waiter/waitress, a really good one. Your pay amounts to very little. You survive off tips. Because your tips are your life, you have become better and better at waiting. Then, just today, the word comes from management that your restaurant is switching to tip-share. That means all customer tips go into a pool, then it is divided up evenly at the end of the shift. Do you still perform as well, even if any increase in tips will go, primarily, to other people? You don’t, do you? If you were a customer, would you then prefer to visit a restaurant with a tip-share system, or one where your money went to award or punish the person who waited on you specifically? It’s an important question, as communism is tip-share, whereas fascism would have management receiving most of the cut and choose who gets paid and how much. Capitalism, caught right in between these two, means the waiters and customers getting more of what they deserve.