In their seminal Harvard Business Review essay Welcome to the Experience Economy, Joseph Pine and James Gilmore made the argument that experiences are a unique economic offering, as distinct from products and services. They present a model of The Progression of Economic Value : beginning with commodity extraction, to product manufacture, to delivering services, and ultimately staging experiences.
Historically a society moves from one phase of economic value to another because of automation, which in turn creates massive economic disruption and job displacement. It could be argued that much of the current wealth disparity and economic unrest in the United States today is driven by advances in artificial intelligence destroying service sector work that employs most of the population.
But whenever the inexorable march of innovation takes something away, it tends to offer something new in its place. For those who are flexible enough to make the transition, the future offers massive new opportunities in experience design.
This article focuses on one particularly important subset of the Experience Economy: Emotional Work. As societies get richer and more technologically advanced, they tend to experience a contrary decline in community and individual well being. Mental and emotional health are the great challenges of our generation, and coping with it will see the birth of an entirely new economic sector of Emotional Work.
Historical Trend
At the lowest level of the economic progression ladder, societies focus on the extraction of commodities. Up until the 1800’s people mostly lived in small agricultural communities where raw materials were turned into finished products that were consumed locally within the community.
The industrial revolution at the end of the 19th century changed all that. For the first time consumers could purchase a wide assortment of finished goods, boxed and canned on store shelves. The preceding manual production methods had been mechanized, creating millions of new factory jobs in the Northeast United States and cities of Europe.
One hundred years later, the arrival of the computer and digital technology automated many of those factory jobs, setting the stage for the services economy where most of us work today. Society moved up the ladder of economic progression from goods to services.
We are now at the precipice of the fourth phase. Artificial intelligence has begun to take over the services provided by knowledge workers, opening up new opportunities in experience design.
Experience Design
The classic example of a company that makes its money primarily from selling experiences is The Walt Disney Company. Before they purchase a single over-priced hotdog or souvenir mug, visitors to Disney World are charged a hefty fee simply to enter “The Magic Kingdom”. Guests are primarily paying to experience a unique environment, to be transported to a different world.
Steve Jobs was also obsessed with the customer experience. Consider walking into an Apple retail store: the customer is immediately transported to another dimension, where the stress and chaos of the “normal world” is replaced by gleaming metal, polished surfaces, and a smiling young “genius” to help guide you along the purchase journey. The obsession with curating customer experience led to the famous decision of delivering all Apple products with a fully charged battery so that users could begin playing with the device “right out of the box”, a revolutionary idea at the time that has become industry standard practice.
Declining Mental Health
As technological advances have moved society up the Progression of Economic Value, there has been a parallel trend in mental health going the other direction. Research has shown that as our material wealth improves we are actually less happy.
A study of 89,000 interviews across 18 countries found that depression is most prevalent in high-income countries, including the United States and France (link). In the three years from 2013 to 2016 alone, major depression rates in the United States rose 33% (link ).
In poorer, more rural countries, depression rates are much lower. A study by the World Health Organization found that people in wealthy countries suffer depression at as much as eight times the rate as in poor countries. And a study comparing depression rates in Nigeria and North America found that women in rural areas were far less likely to suffer depression than their urban counterparts (Tribe, Sebastian Junger).
One of the primary suspects in the decline of mental health in rich countries is social isolation. It is no secret that human beings have an inherent, deep need for connection with others. The Harvard Longitudinal study which followed a group of students for nearly 80 years, concluded that the quality of a person’s social relationships is the primary predictor of happiness and long life (link ).
And yet citizens of high income countries are more isolated than ever. In 1960, only 13% of Americans lived alone. Now, that figure has more than doubled to 28% (link ). In parts of New York City and Paris, over 90% of the residents live alone.
Based on a study conducted by Cigna, fully 46% of adult Americans are lonely, with 18% reporting they “rarely or never” have someone to talk to (link). According to a recent poll 22% of millennials report having “zero friends.” (link) And this loneliness is quite literally killing us. Feeling chronically lonely increases the chance of premature death by 45%, which is worse than excessive drinking, obesity, or air pollution (link).
Wealth and technology have enabled us to hide away from the world. In poor agrarian societies, neighbors intimately know one another because they are forced to regularly ask each other for help. Wealthy residents of North American cities on the other hand don’t need to rely on their community.
Imagine the freelancer or remote worker who has all of their food delivered by an app, and all of their other needs fulfilled by an Amazon drone or driverless delivery vehicle. The modern American ideal is increasingly looking like no human interaction at all.
Empathy As A Service
Perhaps the most powerful, undervalued, and AI-proof experience is human empathy. It is obvious to anyone who has ever interacted with a customer service chatbot that AI is a long way off from mastering the nuances of human emotion and communication.
Focused human attention is just as crucial for health and well being as diet and exercise, and the majority of people in the modern world are starving for authentic connection. While it is possible to elicit an experience of high end luxury through the clever use of lighting and materials, or simulate an adrenaline-fueled skydiving experience through advances in virtual reality, experiencing true empathy requires the presence of a real living, breathing human being.
Emotional Intelligence
Empathy is already an important factor in many of today’s jobs. For healthcare professionals, a skillful bedside manner makes patients more satisfied with their care and more likely to follow a doctor’s recommendations (link). Being able to understand another’s point of view is crucial for any sales or customer support position. However, as improvements in artificial intelligence remove the need for humans to perform the analytical aspects of most white-collar work, emotional intelligence will emerge as an industry in its own right.
Peer Counseling
We are starting to see the first stirrings of dedicated emotional work. Referred to in turn as Peer Counselors, Peer Coaches, or simply Listeners, these are people who provide empathy as a service. On the website 7 Cups of Tea, over 300,000 trained Listeners have provided support to over 25 million people in need. Companies have begun setting up peer coaching networks for employees to help other employees gain perspective, feel less isolated at work, and deal with the ups and downs of the modern professional landscape.
The Peer Counseling movement has grown out of a bifurcation of traditional mental health care. A licensed therapist performs two essential functions: analysis and empathy. Properly diagnosing mental illness, administering cognitive and personality tests, and prescribing medication requires a master’s or PhD level degree. Qualified practitioners charge appropriately high hourly rates. But for many patients the most impactful part of a therapy session is simply having someone listen to them.
Attention is the Remedy
The solution that many people seek from their therapists is focused, non-judgemental, human attention. Therapists are masters at creating psychological safety. Psychological safety is the sense that a person can express their true thoughts and feelings, without fear of judgement or retribution. It is a deeply therapeutic experience, and after a 20 to 30 minute session of empathetic listening the client feels relief from emotional tension, relaxation, and greater mental clarity.
Luckily, it does not take years of schooling to learn the skill of creating psychological safety . Someone with a reasonable amount of natural empathy can learn it over a few days of in-person or online instruction. These techniques include asking the right questions, maintaining eye contact and good body language, and holding an unconditional positive regard for the speaker. No Freudian analysis required.
Emotional Health
The essential innovation of Peer Counseling is decoupling the empathetic and analytical functions of traditional mental health practitioners. “Diagnostic care” and “emotional care” can be delivered separately. Diagnostic care is necessary for individuals suffering from mental illness, while emotional care can be delivered at much lower cost for the vast majority of people who are suffering from loneliness.
Friendship Benches
Dixon Chibanda is one of only 12 psychiatrists in Zimbabwe, a country of 14 million. In his TED talk, Dixon talks about thinking outside the traditional bounds of mental health to serve such a large population. He turned to an unexpected resource: grandmothers. He began training them in a basic form of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and then set up “friendship benches” in central parts of villages around Zimbabwe. In this informal setting, young women who needed someone to talk to could approach a grandmother and work through her problems collaboratively. According to a study on Dixon’s work, “hundreds of grandmothers have treated seventy-thousand patients, and the young women are five times less likely to have suicidal thoughts as a result.”
The Zimbabwe example demonstrates both the extent of the need, as well as the availability of suppliers to meet that need, if we change our idea of what it means to deliver emotional health care. From an economic standpoint, empathy is a commodity: cheap and plentiful. Almost anyone is capable of giving it and everyone needs it. But up until now we have treated it like a high-end service, provided only by highly trained professionals.
Conclusion
Peer counseling is one one of the first types of specialized empathetic work that exists today, but in the Emotion Economy there will be many more specializations and sub-domains that cater to specific communities. There are likely to be Emotional Workers who specialize in hospice and end of life care, Emotional Workers who focus on refugees and displaced people, empathic consultants who focus entirely on the issues of C-suite executives, and others who give attention to children in need. As the means of meeting our physical needs are increasingly automated, our time and energy will be freed up to focus on the things that are most important to us: relationships and human connection. A mechanized, artificially intelligent economy is also a more human one.
The Labyrinth 