Sharing Is Our Meaning

When you explore the sharing economy, there is a feeling that what people call a trend is actually the opposite. The sharing economy is based on some of our most instinctive behaviors which are more primal than our cultural structures or habits. Its actual rise though is made possible by technology. The digital revolution created the perfect context to connect us to people and organize offline trust-based communities enabled by online networks.

That said I love to believe the rapid adoption is more related to its natural fit with who we are and want to be than the purely logical and down to earth recession argument. The sharing economy is based on trust, community and cooperation. These values are nothing new. But the interconnected world brings them back into our lives. The unknown becomes a playground of discovery. Others become a new connection I share interests with. The digital shift just gives us the permission and opportunity to rely on others again, to reinvent our community.

The temptation to ignore the world is less and less viable. The desire to go towards others is what brings us to life. Living an exciting experience without being able to share it in any way is not as joyful. Even in solitary travel, it is when you come back that you realize how it changed you. The interactions with others gives it meaning.

“Sharing with” is our nature and what keeps us “moving on”. 

Humans are one of the most social species as explains  Steven Cole, professor of medicine at UCLA :

“natural selection favored people who needed people. Humans are vastly more social than most other mammals, even most primates, and to develop what neuroscientists call our social brain, we had to be good at cooperating.”

Even if some of us can be defined as introvert or solitary, we cannot survive without the others. You do not need to like a big gathering to grow from human interactions. Loneliness can be a needed moment but never a permanent choice. It actually even kills us, litteraly. 

Cooperation is the behavior that allowed us to survive. I believe that any innovation is actually deeply rooted in a very instinctive behavior. The experiences or products I become addicted to are always the ones I do not overthink, but live, that I do not analyze, but love. That’s the magic : it feels obvious, like an evidence and quickly we can’t remember what our lives were like “before”. Only an innovation based on our human nature can do that. Twitter, Facebook were a revolution but it is called social media for a good reason: it just pushed the button of who we are, a social animal. Deborah Schultz affirms “Technology changes, humans don’t”. Spot on.  

That is the strength of the sharing economy, its roots in our identity and that is and why we cannot call it a trend anymore. It is a revolution. 

The sharing economy is not only about “access” to new things, from a car to a room or a free desk. IT is about access to others. Internet connects us to millions of people instantly but do we really know them as asks Seth Godin:

“Today, like it or not, despite the fact that we continue to segregate the places we choose to live by politics and race, the online social network is anti-gerrymandered. Connect with enough people and you can’t help but bump into something outside your worldview.”

The sharing economy seems to go a step further by not only creating connections but community. You have a real chance to know someone you had no clue even existed just a few hours or days earlier. An avatar or profile becomes someone that created an empowering or unique experience. A stranger can create more value than a friend. If the sharing economy starts with a personal need, its growth and resonance are driven by the inherent sociability it implies while empowering individuals. More you share, more you grow as a person. From access to the others, you build a feeling of who they are. Empathy offers us a true sense of purpose as beautifully described by David Foster Wallace in his 2005 commencement speech “This Is Water”:

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the “rat race,” the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”

This market’s existence that relies on this value seems not only relevant to the digital shift we are experiencing but to who we are as human beings, period. This resonance does not only create a new economy, it brings meaning to our life. And freedom.

You can never go back from that. 

““We must love one another or die.” W.H. Auden

Google Glass, Myself and I

“We systematically overestimate the value of access to info, and underestimate the value of access to each other.”

“smart glasses could do so much more! Why not edit out disturbing sights that haunt us on the way to work? Last year the futurist Ayesha Khanna even described smart contact lenses that could make homeless people disappear from view, “enhancing our basic sense” and, undoubtedly, making our lives so much more enjoyable (…) All these efforts to ease the torments of existence might sound like paradise to Silicon Valley. But for the rest of us, they will be hell. They are driven by a pervasive and dangerous ideology that I call “solutionism”

“Let others lead small lives, but not you. Let others argue over small things, but not you. Let others cry over small hurts, but not you. Let others leave their future in someone else’s hands, but not you.”