Media and engagement are abstractions that let us talk about the world in experiential terms. We can think of them as the ingredients of perceived reality (if there were any other reality). Media that is not engaged is not experienced and, in the absence of media, there is nothing to experience. From my essay Experience Delivery:

"A medium is any part of reality susceptible of being engaged, by means of attention or action, to obtain an experience."

In other words, a medium affords engagement. Engagement is central to experience because experience is the outcome of engaging media. If we cannot engage it, we cannot experience it. The realm of possible engagement with a medium consists of the "action possibilities" afforded by the medium. The nature of the medium (i.e., its form, characteristics) determines what engagement is possible. With these ideas in mind we can express a behavior space in its simplest possible terms. Consider the following simplification:

All engagement comes in two shapes. The first shape takes the form of attention because attention is the simplest form of engagement (e.g., like when you look at someone in the eye or when you focus on a song to understand the lyrics). I also elaborated on this idea in Experience Delivery:

"Attentional engagement produces experiences that result from contemplating a medium and it is what we use to consume the experiences offered by TV, music, film, and performance (e.g., sports, a lecture)."

Some media allow only attentional engagement. Consider, for example, a film or the moon; both are media that you cannot touch, smell, or otherwise engage except through attention (there is a caveat to this that I shall cover in a future essay — the case of mimesis). If you think of the experiences offered by a medium as coming in stages, attentional engagement would reveal the first stage. The second stage is revealed by the world of actions and behavior, "higher" forms of engagement. From Experience Delivery:

"Higher engagement produces experiences that result from acting upon a medium (as compared to just paying attention to it). It is the type of engagement we use to create experiences like throwing a ball, holding a conversation, driving a car, and assembling Ikea furniture."

Higher engagement is built on top of attention and is an avenue to experience 'more' of the medium. If a medium affords higher engagement, your experience of the medium will be incomplete without it. Higher engagement unlocks the value of a medium and is the only way to fully experience its qualities. Think, how pleasing is a pizza that you can't eat? How useful is a car that you can't drive or ride? How good is a world that you can only contemplate?

In summary, attentional engagement gives us the simplest experience a medium can offer, that of contemplation; higher engagement, on the other hand, reveals the medium’s felt qualities, giving us a richer, fuller experience that amounts to "living" the medium.

Engagement allows us to consume experiences. When you watch a film or have dinner at a restaurant you are consuming an experience. Consuming any given experience requires a specific mix of media and engagement. Consider these examples:

• You want to drink coffee? You require media in the form of coffee and engagement in the form of drinking.

• You want to experience a roadtrip? You need media in the form of a vehicle and engagement in the form of driving.

• You want to experience a Broadway show? You need media in the form of a stage, performers, lights, and music and engagement in the form of watching and listening.

In addition to engagement coming from you, consuming certain experiences also requires engagement coming from the medium:

• For your experience of the Broadway show to be possible, you need engagement from the performers in the form of dancing and singing.

• You want to experience a massage? You need media in the form of a masseuse or a massaging device and engagement from the medium in the form of massaging.

When you decide to seek an experience, the challenge at hand is precisely this, producing the combination of media and engagement that enable it. In other words, no experience is free, consuming an experience requires effort; to consume an experience there is media and engagement to be produced. In Journeys and Destinations, I framed this effort as a journey:

"An essential condition for a destination to be reachable is that there must be a path that leads to it. Just as we cannot simply teleport to a place, we cannot simply 'have' an experience we consider valuable just by thinking of it. Reaching an experiential destination, like their physical counterparts, necessitates a path, a 'set of experiences' that we must have before and in order to attain the experience we are seeking."

Because for something to be consumed it has to first be created, I term the effort of producing the media and the engagement required to deliver a given experience creation. The journey to create an experience can be very varied. You can produce the media you need either by procuring it from the environment, from a third party, or by creating it yourself. On the other hand, engagement can be contributed by you, by the medium, or a combination of both. We can think of the effort of mustering this media/engagement mix as the "experiential cost" of consuming the experience. In other words:

Clearly, you may want to consume an experience without bearing the experiential costs of creating it. It is not unreasonable, say, to want to drink coffee without brewing the coffee yourself. People want to devote their time and energy to have the experiences they care about having. That is why many of the experiences we consume are powered by media and engagement furnished by third-parties. If we had to create from scratch each of the experiences we consume everyday, our lives would be unrecognizably burdensome, closer to those of people in early agricultural societies.

We have a strong incentive to delegate our creation to third parties because creation is burdensome. For people, creating most experiences is friction, an experiential cost to be avoided. Furthermore, many of the experiences we consume during life we simply cannot create ourselves. You may be able to brew your own coffee, but how about building your own car or creating your own smartphone apps? Delegating creation of experiences to the fittest and most resourceful has given us access to an experience marketplace with options we wouldn't otherwise have.

Our economy is purpose-built to consume experiences without creating them. There is something about the way we experience that makes it seem that value lies in consuming the experience, not in creating it. It's a fact of life that has shaped the way our economy works. We have devised a dynamic where we can almost certainly make someone else carry the experiential burden of delivering the experiences we want to consume. From my essay Experiential Value:

"The value we see in avoiding certain experiences and having certain others is the value that every person is looking for and the one we have learned to deliver and trade with others. We have effectively turned what was once an individual game of subsistence into an interconnected game of circular, self-interested empathy; a dynamic where we all make ends meet by helping each other experience more of what we want and less of what we don't."

In an attempt to make our lives more livable and our economies more efficient we have restricted creation to the very activities that finance our ability to consume. The incentives are such that we only subject ourselves to the experience of creation if it increases our ability to delegate creation. We are incited to create as an "economic activity"; that is, to engage in creation for someone else, for a customer, for a supervisor, for a public, but never for ourselves. Creation for the self takes the form of hobbies, which we have cast as frivolous luxuries because the markets have rendered creation for the self unnecessary.

We consume experiences directly, but we create them by proxy. Consumption is individualized, but all creation has been compartmentalized and centralized into companies, then cut it into "chunks of creation" that don't create anything by themselves. At work we are assigned to repeat a small step of a value chain, a module of a broader creation process that brings no satisfaction on its own, a piece of a puzzle to deliver an experience demanded by someone else, a routine undesirable enough for us to expect monetary compensation in exchange for enduring it, money we then use to fuel our own consumption and put everybody else on a treadmill similar to ours.

To those with enough means, the ease and convenience of consuming experiences in the marketplace makes it possible to live an entire life without creating experiences altogether. The market economy liberates some people entirely from the burdens of creation, but retools the lives of almost everybody else to serve creation without personal purpose, the only purpose served being consumption itself. We have become, in strict sense, a consumer society.

It may be worth noting that the consumer society is a natural result, not an outcome designed in secret rooms. It was our fundamental drive to improve our experience that took us here. From my essay Reducing Friction:

"Just like people are willing to pay for a better travel experience, people exhibit a willingness to pay for solutions that reduce friction in other aspects of life. In fact, a large portion of the economy is devoted to reducing friction. This collective desire to keep life livable has given rise to markets that naturally form around people's most common and valuable goals. In these markets, firms and individuals offer solutions that help people deal with the frictions of life."

It's Zipf's Principle of Least Effort applied to behavior. Daniel Kahneman discussed it in his influential book "Thinking, Fast and Slow":

"A general 'law of least effort' applies to cognitive as well as physical exertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature." (p. 35)

The consumer society has had its critics ever since the 19th century, when we started conceiving of ourselves as consumers. There is simply something uncanny about it. One of the strongest criticisms I've come about is the degree to which it makes us dependent on others for even the smallest things. In his paper "Consuming Life", renowned sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called it "trained incapacity":

"To become a consumer means to be dependent for one’s survival, even for keeping up simple daily routines, on the consumer market. It means to forget or fail to learn the skills of coping with life challenges, except the skill of seeking (and, hopefully, finding) the right object, service or counsel among the marketed commodities." (p. 25)

But perhaps a deeper and more scathing criticism is that relying on consumption makes our lives in a way 'fake'. A life of consumption is a life of experiences designed and created by others. Consumption betrays a fear of "letting go" and taking our own path, a need for adult supervision, to have someone to support us or someone to blame in case our experience goes wrong, as if we were looking for shelter from an unpredictable sequence of events in our life.

The truth is that a life sanitized of creation is a life sanitized of risk. And experiencing risk is what makes situations feel real. Bauman points it out while discussing the "pre-scripted" and "pre-packaged" experiences long offered by travel agencies:

"Tourists of the consumer society want their holidays to be escapes from daily routine – but also to be escapes from the hazards, confusions and uncertainties endemic to their daily life: the holidays they would gladly pay for should be predictable, calculable, efficient and controlled. The holiday companies, just like McDonald’s restaurants, are expected to provide, first of all, shelters of security and predictability. Adventures should be carefully planned to include a happy end, excitements sanitized and pollution-free, the ‘far away from everywhere’ must be located no more than a car-drive distance from shops and restaurants, wildernesses ought to have exits well mapped and signed. Wild beasts should be either tamed or locked in secure enclosures and snakes, if encountered, should have their poisonous venom removed. What makes the dreamed-of holidays alluring to seekers of adventures and strong emotions is the certainty (included in the package and protected by travel insurance) that someone, somewhere is fully aware of what is going on and how it is going to end, and so no shock will be ‘for real’, being an ‘experience of ’ rather than the thing itself." (p. 26)

It is not my intention to paint the consumer society as our ruin, but to point out the complications that it brings about. To be clear, having an economy that allows people to consume experiences without creating them has tangibly improved the lives of millions of people. And that is the goal of it all, to improve our experience. The problem is that our new pattern of creation and consumption is eroding the base that all meaningful experience is built upon: Our identity.

People craft their identities through behavior, through the experiences they choose to have. We can think of behavior as a performance that gives us a story to tell ourselves about ourselves. Similarly, our behavior also gives people around us a story to form their image of us.

Creation and consumption are both behaviors, but they tell very different stories. Creation is inherently storyful: When you create an experience for yourself you traverse a journey. You have to travel, think, plan, procure, work. Living the journey creates a story that gives meaning to the results of creation, to the meal you cooked for yourself, the event you organized, or the house you built. When we create media, we infuse it with a story that we can relive by re-engaging the medium, a story to tell ourselves that explains why we did it and informs what we might do next.

Pure consumption is different. When we consume experiences in the marketplace, we don’t only liberate ourselves from the burden of creation, we deprive ourselves of this journey. The story is compressed to “I wanted X, so I bought X”, with no sequence of events leading to the outcome, whim as the sole justification. By depriving ourselves of meaningful creation, we forgo the proof of work that builds our identity.

Not so long ago, our personal pattern of consumption/creation was almost predestined by tradition and circumstance. Karl Thompson summarizes this position in his sociology blog:

"(...) after World War II, universal access to higher education and social welfare benefits in Europe led to the erosion of traditional sources of identity provided by family, traditional authority, and work. Today, individuals are ‘free’ from the chains of external sources of identity, but this freedom comes at a price. Individuals are now compelled to give meaning to their lives without the certainty that they are making the right choice that in the past had come from tradition. Individuals are forced to be reflexive, to examine their own lives and to determine their own identities. In this context, consumption may be a useful vehicle for constructing a life narrative that gives focus and meaning to individuals."

Reliance on consumption disrupts the narrative we tell ourselves of our lives and compels us to source those narratives externally. That is, precisely, the role that "identity" brands play in the market. In my essay Branded Experiences, I discussed how brands serve as vessels of meaning that people can use to express themselves:

"Because brands embody people's aspirations and desires, they deliver experiences that resonate with consumers at a personal level. Brands offer internal alignment and validation because they are a means for people to express who they are and who they want to become. They also offer external validation because brands are a recognizable signal of certain traits, goals, and mindsets which can be picked up by other people."

But how do we even go about fixing this? It’s not easy to go against an incentive structure that permeates everything. The only answer, I'm afraid, is for us to become hyper-aware of our experience. Only by being conscious of the moment we're living can we safeguard it from meaninglessness and savor it for what it is. We can become guardians of our experience, curating a life by deciding which stories we want to live and which circumstances we want to embrace. To do so, we need to "zoom out" one last time and let our experience become the medium, only so can we decide if we want to contemplate it or grasp it to experience it fully. If we are mindful of our consumption, we can use it as an instrument to focus on creating those experiences that really make life our own. The rise of Do It Yourself (DIY) culture and the so called "passion economy" are some of dynamics we're seeing in this direction.

Choosing your experience is picking the content of your life. When we consume, we live life like everyone else. When we create, we live it our way. But knowing when to do each implies knowing oneself, perhaps at a level that we aren’t used to knowing ourselves. Do you know what is it that you want out of your experience? Do you know how you want your experience to be like? The truth is that there are no answers to these questions, except the ones you give yourself. The ultimate expression of volition and freedom may very well be deciding to look for answers.