Ever since we humans evolved and got opposable thumbs, start hunting, foraging, tribe’d up and started living in caves our culture has been defined by five common behavioural traits within those cultures:
Art
Religion
Music
Language
Tool Making
This has been widely recognised by sociology, biological evolution, behavioural science and psychology. For any discipline to agree with one another is like the intellectual equivalent of Chelsea fans celebrating diversity; it’s unusual and good to see.
They agree because what you have is a common set of purpose for humans and if we apply it to cave-person us then it’s easy to prove:
We’ve been doing all this before grunts became words, it’s what makes us human. Let’s do a speed date download of how those traits manifest themselves in the modern world:
Art - It’s still epic beautiful paintings, we also started sculpting, then exploring, mapping, then ceramics, then metals then we started making giant arty sculptures that people live inside! Boy did we enlarge our art mindset.
Religion - 100,000 since time began and 4,200 in today’s world (Go Jedi!), it’s a thing. Whether it is organised and followed by masses or something you and Daphne created in the garden after a joint, we humans love religion.
Language - 129,864,880 is how many books Google says there are in the world right now. Including this one by me #humblebrag. We love to communicate and we have 6,500 different active languages in the world today!
Tool Making - The computer, the phone device you check 47 times a day to get dopamine hits* from email and social media. Code is the modern tool making, we just make soft not hard stuff now.
Music - No need to explain this one! I think we are good and grateful for the Spotify customised services.
*One type of dopamine is behavioral addiction which connects directly to our top 5. It’s a circle of purpose which is where human nature can be working against us when we add tech, YouTube algorithms, Email and Social Media.
It’s hard to argue with such evidence, it’s just a practical truth of what makes up each of us. The joy here is that it runs even deeper than the ideologies of consumerism and capitalism that drives today’s society as it’s not flavour of the month ideology, it’s inherent human nature.
When born your brain has a natural predisposition to these fives areas, it’s gets divided up so you may accept music but love religion and be so-so about language, can paint but are shit at it but love designing bridges, it’s contextual to who you are BUT it’s there.
This is present in the brain in terms of what it is attracted to, the brain likes familiar and familiar to the unconscious mind is patterns it recognises such as imagery, such as phrases, such as type of music and it’s not as simple as what it says on the tin. Religion is not the god and only the god we assume, we pray to sporting gods, we pray to music gods and like me, love rare Adidas Superstars and marvel at securing a rare pair like a rosary to the devout. Religion simply touches the beliefs of the person and how they view the ' greater good’ and the same is true for what attracts them to art, music, language and tool making.
When it comes to decision making we naturally align our selections and preferences to what we favour and when that touches all five behaviours it’s brand nirvana because it’s human nirvana, it’s touches our natural alignment, the key being alignment. It’s very much investigating the meaning, the magic 5 and the nostalgia of each of the 5 and aligning that to different people to aim to serve.
After all, it’s not optional, it’s in us all, it’s just how we each divide and focus the five traits that make us behave and believe in different ways.