Positive future daydreams as everyday escape attempts from consumption scripts

This is the presentation text for the CCT conference. Written with Becky Jenkins and Lizzie Nixon

 

Cultural scripts suggest that success in life is predominantly expressed in terms of acquiring new and ‘better’ objects and an upscaling lifestyle. Visions of the perfect future tend to be underpinned by financial or material wealth as we draw from the consumer culture around us to make sense of our lives.

In consumer research, such fantasies are recognised as part of the overall consumption experience. Consumers daydream about things they do not possess and material possessions emerge triumphant as the most common objects of desire, with better houses being the most important objects, followed by cars and luxury goods, then consumer experiences such as travel and exotic vacations. Only after these come ‘ideals’ that are less material and more lifestyle-focused such as successful careers, family, happiness, health and philanthropy which are again above more general dreams of ‘wealth’.

However, these studies ask specifically about consumption, bringing consumer experiences to the fore. In contrast, we seek to explore the roles that goods and experiences take on in broader imaginings such as those described by Cohen and Taylor in their 1992 text ‘Escape Attempts’

We draw on data from part of a phenomenological study that takes ‘positive future’ daydreaming as the starting point. Although daydreaming is not restricted to such a mood and temporal structure, this focus is interesting since it tells us something important about the nature of everyday life. Considering previous consumer research, we expected the desire for and acquisition of consumer goods to form a central role in how daydreams were described, but what we found was quite different.

Beyond consumer research we find broader descriptions of the relationship between the imagination and everyday life. For example, Cohen and Taylor view daydreams as a form of resistance to daily routine, an ‘escape attempt’ that may also vary from cognitive engineering such as distancing or self-awareness, to life-encompassing endeavours that teeter on the edge of madness. However, each attempt is underpinned by the notion that we may imagine the future to be different and better than the reality we live each day. This approach may illuminate our understanding both of the ubiquity of imaginative scenarios in everyday life, as well as what this might tell us about the world ‘left behind’ by dreamers. Cohen and Taylor refer to ‘paramount reality’ as a way of capturing the density, urgency and intensity of the demands of the everyday on our consciousness. For them daydreams offer a temporary escape from such a reality and, akin to summer holiday, facilitate the continuation of routine life with renewed commitment.

Thy also point out that such escape attempts are seldom unique. Although we are invariably the hero in our imagined future, even those keen to shirk the predictable life scripts of falling in love, succeeding at work, and having children, may draw from the films, TV and novels of popular culture to construct their fantasy. In the search for a ‘real self’, this stock of symbolic material reveals a painfully soap-opera, cliché-ridden narrative.

So how might this be related to consumption and the imagination? Pre-consumption imagining in consumer behaviour theory tends towards a future orientation theorised as ‘desire’ and the symbolic value attached to goods (for example see Campbell, Fournier and Guiry, Christensen, Belk et al., and d’Astous and Deschênes).

In our consumer society commodities and experiences are markers of status and aspiration; the objects that star in our daydreams apparently tell us who we want to be holding ‘magical meaning’ by concretising abstract concepts that are then realised through purchase. To use McCracken’s example, the desire for a rose covered cottage represents a desire for a happy family life, financial security and perhaps a slower pace of life. A desired good then acts as a bridge between the real and the ideal, so when we imagine owning a particular object, we imagine that it will bring with it our ideal circumstances. Whilst this suggests that the ready availability of marketing symbolism makes commodities useful imaginative resources, we might also note the seemingly insatiable appetite for novelty, and new experiences that is assumed to underpin such desire.

Despite these compelling narratives, there are few empirical studies on the contents of the imagination and if we look elsewhere we may note that individuals also dream about personal ideals where it is not objects that are at the centre.

Surveys show both a desire for higher income and materialism, but also revealed the importance of relationships in life satisfaction and well being. There may also be a current cultural trend towards low consumption, high fulfilment lifestyles, for example as reflected in Soper’s work on alternative hedonism. She theorises that attitudes toward consumerism are changing, not least because of the disaffection with a ‘work and spend’ lifestyle and associated ecological degradation. And as Thomas notes in his review of television programmes on the subject, this ambivalence to consumer desire is beginning to form part of British culture.

In summary, consumer research has put emphasis on consumption as the focus of daydreaming, yet broader arguments see it as a way to resist everyday life, including the consumer lifestyles that dominate ‘paramount reality’. Daydreaming still has its scripts but these may focus on cultural trends such as a desire for community and simple living. 

Phenomenological interviews have allowed us to capture the experiences of imagining. We now draw from the stories of 12 individuals, some of whom were going through specific life events (such as expecting a baby, retiring, buying a house) that are likely to focus their hopes for the future.

Our data supports the ubiquity and prominence of daydreams in the experience of the everyday and here we organise them into two main themes. We argue that the role of consumer goods and experiences was apparently unimportant. Instead daydreams draw from cultural stock for ideal relationships with others. In doing so however, they may support the continuation of everyday life where consumption is much more prominent.

Let’s start with the ‘othering’ of consumer goods in daydreams. Here we see goods receding into the background, ‘there’, but not referred to or imagined in detail. Instead, relationships were the primary focus. This is captured Emily’s story about imagining her new flat:

Home is the way I think about it, I feel home because I can see myself walking through the front door, chucking my keys down on our front door dresser that’s going to be by the front door and walking in, probably with food bags and you know sorting out the kitchen and stuff like that, just normal and homely.

The goods that she mentions – a dresser, groceries and kitchen – form part of the background for the action that instead centres on the notion of ‘home’. In this way goods take on a rather different role in daydreams than in our daily lives, which may be preoccupied with them. For example we might consider explanations of goods as markers of social events, and compare this to goods in the imagination. Douglas and Isherwood (1979) use Christmas as an example. Christmas is differentiated from other days because of the markers that we use and associate with it (turkey, decorations, gifts, the tree etc). A daydream about Christmas however may centre on the warm feeling of family gathering together. The material paraphernalia is all ‘there’, but in the background, not enjoying the same importance as they do in real life. We might imagine a decorated tree in our imaginative escape that focuses on the family, but not the other things that go with it, such as buying new decorations, untangling fairly lights, and spending hours decorating. Although goods take on a prevailing role in the paramount reality of Christmas, our imaginings resist such everydayness.

In our interviews desires for strong and happy relationships, facing personal challenges and daydreaming of achieving them were particularly prominent even when an anti-materialistic sentiment was not explicit. In instances where we might have expected daydreams to consist of elaborate details of consumer goods, relationships directly surfaced as an overriding concern. For example, Sally tells us that she has imagined and re-imagined her wedding and describes the importance of ensuring her fiancé is happy with all aspects of the day:

I would hate that Mark resented any part of our wedding, for anything you know… I think a lot of weddings…especially this expensive wedding that I went to, it was so much about ‘I’ve got to have this dress, got to have this and this food’ and I just didn’t want that. I just wanted a day that was about getting married and plus Mark doesn’t like being centre of attention at all, which is I think probably part of the reason why he didn’t really want to get married at all when we first met.

We may contrast the materialism of a wedding Sally attended – the paramount reality of weddings – with her own imaginings that resist such a reality. The fact that relationships are acknowledged as a priority introduces the notion that individuals desire, imagine and prioritise the things that goods may help to symbolise over and above their possession. Although McCracken and Campbell theorise that people daydream about the symbolic meaning of goods for them the goods always seem to remains central. Yet we find that it is experiences and relationships that individuals talk about most when discussing their hopes for the future.

For instance, interviewees quite happily talked about the fact that they wanted to settle down and have a family, that they were looking forward to being a Mother, or embarking on life as a couple ‘warts and all’, or escaping the rat race to enjoy a quieter life. Emily explains further;

I think that’s one of the images and kind of a memory and a future that James and I both had is when we’ve been lying on a bed, in my room and the sun’s coming through the window and we’ve just been lying on top of the duvet, reading a paper or just chatting […], and James has turned to me and said ‘I want this, I want us to be lying on a bed with a white duvet, and I want the sun coming in and I want to be able to hear our kids and our dogs playing in the back garden’ and to me, that’s what home is. It’s like us being comfortable, knowing they were all safe, it’s a cosy place,

We note that Emily does not seem to desire the white duvet, even though it is part of how she symbolises a happy home and this contrasts with Belk et al’s study of consumer passions where one of their participants claims; ‘I wanted this car so bad I could taste it!”. Perhaps consumer goods are more likely to form the focus when consumption is the starting point for research? We find that goods have a different presence in the imagination than they have in paramount reality and that non-materialistic, traditional roles and scripts were prominent in the daydreams of the people we spoke to.

The second theme is the apparent lack of imaginative ambition. Participants took pleasure from daydreaming about traditional roles and common cultural scripts that referred to more fundamental ways of living rather than elaborate fantasy. For instance, Vicki talks about wanting to be a mother:

[I’m looking forward to] just being at home and baking and cooking, looking after the baby, all of that…I think that’s why I got married quite young and am having a baby quite quick…From when I was about 14, I was going to get married at 24, have my first baby at 26 and my second one at 28. That was always what I wanted…. I think I’ve had such a nice home life, home and family life…I just want exactly the same thing and Sean has a lovely home life, a lovely family, we’re both just really lucky.

This housewife role is not (yet) experienced as a mundane routine but offers a sense of pleasure and this theme of simple, perhaps nostalgic, daydreaming was shared by Anna as we imagines life with a new baby:

There’s lots of stuff I could do and throw myself into in the village and things to keep me socially active and involved…if you had a church and a nursery network you could make quite strong links…even our relationship with people in this block has changed since I’ve been pregnant…we’ve been a bit more social with people, so you get into a different mindset about the value of having your neighbours around.

Our participants’ descriptions overwhelmingly emphasised non-material aspects of life based on better relationships with others. A further example is provided by David who with his partner, is currently planning ‘escape’ to rural Italy:

…this is a change in the lifestyle, better healthier diet and more activity in the lifestyle, whereas here I get to work about 8.30, 9 o’clock, I don’t even take a lunch, someone will get a sandwich for me so I’m pretty much sitting down until 7 o’clock at night, then I go home, because I’m so knackered I fall asleep and I go to bed by 10 most nights, that’s my life now and that’s just not good, mentally or physically…Certainly there will be a lot more activity, such as chopping wood and all those things, I think it will be a more outside existence because the weather’s so much nicer as well, […] we’re going to have a big vegetable patch, like I say we’ve been experimenting with tomatoes and courgettes and things here and I just love the idea of doing that…I think there will be some interesting changes…

As Cohen and Taylor (1992) propose, daydreams here enable individuals to engage in identity work, imagining and planning who they will be and what life might be like in the future. Our participants described daydreams that depicted them in a preferred situation, but that resisted current consumer lifestyles, or other unsatisfactory aspects of everyday life. Emily provides a further example. She is currently frustrated by a difficulty in finding somewhere to live and explains that she turns to her imagination to play out various ‘ideal’ marriage proposal scenarios.

In my mind’s eye I’ve got ideals of when he’s going to propose and how he’s going to propose. I mean they’re all wrong but it’s just my way of controlling the situation…… we’re going on a UK holiday this year rather than abroad and we’re walking up Scafell Pike [an area of outstanding natural beauty]…, he loves walking and camping and being outdoors like that and I do it for him, and I just, in my head I’ve got an ideal that you know, we’ll own the flat by then and we’ll be on top of that mountain and have reached it at the end of our holiday… and he’ll just drop to one knee and propose on top of the mountain in the sunshine and you know amazing views [laughs] but again you know I’m building up this massive picture in my head…

Here we see that despite the important purchase of a new flat, Emily’s imagination focuses on non-material things. Even in the various proposal dreams, material things such as the ring are absent. Her daydreams serve to construct an alternative ‘better’ reality providing a compensatory function. 

Initially we were surprised by the seemingly minor role played by consumption. Daydreaming may play a key role in understanding consumption, but consumption seems to have only a cameo role in these daydreams.

We heard descriptions that prioritised ‘more important’ ideals of life; love between newlyweds, slower and healthier lifestyles abroad, and a concern for family-orientated living and of community. Here values were not contained in the daydreams of goods, but rather goods were relegated to props in the background. They were there, but ‘othered’. Our approach didn’t emphasise a consumer study and we allowed participants to define the reality of their own lives. It is of course possible that for others – especially perhaps those without prominent future events to articulate – consumption is a ‘fallback’ resource from which to conjure desire. This in itself would be significant. It would mean that we most desire goods when we have few relationship scripts to work on.

If the everyday is made up of consumer matter this reality may be escaped in the imagination where other roles can be grasped. And yet our interviewees’ daydreams appeared to lack ambition. They were the predictable scripts of relationships, marriage and a happy home life that Cohen and Taylor (1976) wrote about nearly 40 years ago. They seemed to favour some more enduring cultural values of living with others, scripts that participants came across in the media, or remembered from childhood.

It could be that they only revealed the more ‘normal’ or socially acceptable, predictable scripts in an interview situation, so perhaps there are other fantastic desires that are much harder to reveal in research. Nevertheless, we may have stumbled upon ‘latent’ non-materialistic values waiting to emerge from everyday frustrations with our consumer society in the form of daydreams that can then be actualised. We could see this in the context of calls for alternative hedonism for example, and hope that these participants represent a desired escape from an overly materialist society in favour of ‘simple’ values. Could it be that these are the ‘green shoots’ of more substantial resistance to the normalcy of consumer desire and a work and spend culture?

Maybe, but we must also recognise that these participants still live consumer lifestyles. Through the interviews and their arrangements the everyday weight of consumer culture presented itself – from fitting interviews around work and leisure activities (including shopping trips), to recognising that even when (and if) some of these dreams are actualised, the market may suddenly present itself as more prominent. For example, Emily might not dream of a diamond engagement ring, but we may be certain that at some point her partner and her will imagine buying one, and then go shopping.

We must therefore acknowledge Cohen and Taylor’s observation about the conservative role of daydreams. These non-materialistic desires may act as a ‘coping mechanism’, or distancing of the self from the everyday for the purpose of allowing the everyday routine of our consumer society to continue.

So in conclusion, we have contrasted the prominence of commodities in narratives relating to daydreams, with a broader view of everyday imagining and the possibility of non-materialistic desires. Drawing from phenomenological data we have then noted the apparently peripheral role of commodities in consumers’ hopes for the future, and the centrality of non-material living in daydreams. However in making sense of this we have noted Cohen and Taylor’s observations about the imagination as a form of resistance to everyday life that helps to manage rather than transform paramount reality.

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Tagged: consumption, everyday life, imagination, phenomenology, resistance

Posted in: Research, Uncategorized