I want more stamina.
I do about an hour of kickboxing twice a week, but that still isn't enough exercise — ideally you'd do it every day.
A friend who goes to b-monster (dark boxing fitness) wakes around 5 a.m. and goes before work.
Always good color in the face, sharp mind, easygoing personality.
Drinks only lightly at gatherings. Perfectly healthy.
Frankly, waking at five every day for hard exercise is an amazing routine — and I can't copy it.
(Though if I locked in a schedule and set a bedtime it might be fine; thinking about work, somehow I can't.)
Building work stamina seems to need physical stamina, not just mental.
※ Of course there are friends who never exercise, have endless energy, and happily work from morning to night — exceptions exist.
Still, even though I exercise some, daily running or gym feels like a chore.
Abrupt topic change: interest in healthy living seems to have risen a lot.
Especially among people in their twenties, I feel it a lot.
Physical stamina, and also interest in calm and wellbeing.
That said, I still felt that for most people — shades of intensity aside — the underlying idea was still: keep work going smoothly, stabilize social status, enjoy an easy retirement.
But lately I've started to feel that the weight of wellbeing-ish aspects might be larger than I imagined.
Personally I think this trend's origin is around when "live by what you love" influencers — YouTubers, TikTokers — took off about ten years ago. It was probably around earlier, but those influencers intensified it.
The trend wasn't only entertainment; it hit business too, and around then shady info products also seemed to multiply.
Now, seeing older business-influencer hype like "treating work like play is normal" feels somehow nostalgic — a bit dated.
Mechanically: they say they do work like play, but those business influencers are outliers smaller than the top 1%, looking trendy while the real strength is only fame — influencer business. Cases like that are common.
Only they profit; zero reproducibility.
Worse: the influencers themselves often don't realize it, cheerfully recommend it to others, and sincerely think people who can't do it just lack effort.
Chasing that, countless businesses get launched with no demand from anyone and fade into fog. I don't see many people around me heavily shaped by it, but on SNS you see it. I feel sorry for them.
※ I say "business influencers" for convenience — plenty of people with similar traits aren't labeled that way.
In the end it's closer to the old pattern of a famous TV person starting a brand than to "business."
So I'd thought those supposedly new values — "live well," "live enjoyably" — weren't that different from climb as high as you can, earn easily.
A clear example: lines like "don't care about company evaluations; it's the era of the individual" — you've heard them a lot — but then follower counts and view KPIs become important. Without them it doesn't work.
But as someone on the fringe of digital marketing I want to stress: SNS has overwhelming "strength."
Like the magnetic field changing — far beyond traditional marketing tactics.
This isn't "SNS is bad." Tidying the above: the wellbeing-ish "new values" of the last decade or so weren't really different from old values — only the packaging changed.
Not new values — a new way of showing them, I thought.
Even with new packaging, the center of gravity still seemed overwhelmingly on the long-standing values.
But here's the main point: I've started to feel those values may really be changing.
Some people may think I'm noticing late!
(Critiques from weird scam-adjacent influencers in the info-product world are out of scope. Not accepted.)
But I only started genuinely feeling it recently — hearing it from old friends, coworkers, and new people I meet.
About ten years after YouTube and the like took off, I'm finally feeling it in my skin.
Concretely: say there's unusual rice available in central Tokyo.
A rice farmer who grew brand rice in some region sells it with a story — "we want Tokyo-born rice loved worldwide!" — in a very stylish package, it trends on SNS and sells.
The familiar "I bought because I empathized with the story" tale.
Every time I saw stories like that I thought: people might buy once for buzz, but to make it a real business you still need concept differentiation, price, first-recall, persona-fit tactics and reach!
Empathy buyers can't be that big a market!
That kind of thing.
(Only an example, but I don't think it's that far off.)
Lately though I've started thinking: people who really buy from story empathy are actually plentiful, and values may be changing in a real sense.
I wrote the above only from a marketing/sales-strategy view — buy or not from story empathy — but what I want to stress is I've begun to feel a large value current shifting.
It extends to many phenomena.
For example, on a recent HR-system design project I used to feel company VISION and VALUE designs were partly armchair theory — but I sensed a stronger tendency to take them seriously.
If that offended anyone, I'm truly sorry — but I really thought that.
But maybe they really are changing. Depending how you hear it, maybe nothing new — still, among recent personal discoveries it was fairly big.
Writing this wore me out.
I wish I could develop it further, but no more ideas came.
That's all.
© 2023 ZUUHE