What would the future look like in a world where sustainability and wellbeing take centre stage is the question addressed in a major new project, Good Life 2030 Ireland.
It has been developed by Thinkhouse, backed by Creative Ireland, a government programme, in collaboration with Purpose Disruptors, a community of advertising insiders who believe the industry has the creative power to help drive sustainable behaviour and so tackle climate change.
Traditionally, advertising has promoted a vision of the good life centred on the accumulation of material wealth, status, and consumption – buy more stuff, in other words.
“Obviously we know now that this vision is hitting major flaws. Our planet’s living systems can’t keep up with this pace of more, more, more, but it also doesn’t really seem to have made people’s lives any better,” explains Laura Costello.
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With the need for climate action starkly clear, creatives need to get creative, and help forge the solutions we need to tackle it.
For Costello, it’s about getting the industry on board “to treat the climate crisis as the defining creative challenge of our generation,” she says.
Ireland has legally binding emissions targets it needs to hit by 2030, which it is not on track to meet.
There is, moreover, all sorts of problems with current communications around sustainability, including greenwashing, which distorts our view of the future.
“The idea with Good Life 2030 was how can we connect more with the future. In order to achieve our longer-term visions we need to be able to imagine a sustainable future that is really irresistible,” she says.
Unfortunately, we’re currently stuck with a view of sustainability as being about “loss and less”, while “good is about more”, she points out.
How do we change the narrative, she asks. “How do we actually reimagine the components of an enjoyable life that just happens to be sustainable? This project doesn’t lead with sustainability at the forefront, it just asks people: what do you want from life? What is your vision for the future?”
As part of its qualitative and quantitative research, it crafted a number of exercises to help respondents imagine what a good life would look like for them in 2030.
“Overarchingly the general revelation was that nothing mattered more to citizens than feeling connected,” she says.
That included a desire for more connection to self, more connection to others and more connection to nature.
“What was really interesting was that sustainability came up nearly immediately, and everybody related their health to the health of other people and of the planet,” she says.
That tallies with earlier research that suggests an overwhelming majority of people in Ireland care about climate. “They talk about it, and they want to take action, but we also know from marketing and advertising data that there is an intention-action gap. We need to be able to create the desire to move forward in the now,” she says.
Short-term thinking
Part of what prevents us from doing that is the short time frames in which we tend to operate.
“There were people we spoke to as part of the research who talked about how much they cared about social justice, and about the environment, but what they cared about most was their family and their day-to-day lives,” she says.
It’s human nature, and wholly understandable at one level. But when it comes to tackling climate catastrophe it doesn’t help.
What is required is the so-called “cathedral thinking” that saw massive religious buildings started by people who knew they would not be completed in their lifetime, she says.
But one of the things Good Life 2030 established was that simply giving people time to pause and reflect was transformational.
“When people started thinking about the future that they wanted to live, they changed things in their lives today,” she says.
Age had a bearing on what we believe constitutes a good life too. For older generations, hard work paid off.
For younger people, struggling to get on the housing ladder, it’s not so obviously the case, a fact that has fed into practices such as quiet quitting and the growth in interest in the universal basic income, to guarantee that everybody in society has their basic needs covered.
People want to have a sense of meaning and purpose, but there’s a clear need to reset the balance. Until now, we’ve focused on work and career success as the primary metrics for a good life. We need to redefine what success means with more nuance, she says.
Past performance really is no indicator of future success. “We need to channel this sense of possibility beyond what has happened in the past, because we are in completely uncertain terrain in terms of the polycrisis that we are living through,” she cautions.
“To take the four-day week as just one example, having that one additional day off has been proven to increase productivity, reduce burnout and be better for the environment,” she says.
One of the biggest indicators that emerged from the study was a desire for greater stability and security. “People want to go from this sense of shaky foundations to secure freedom. They feel insecure at present,” she adds.
Another was people’s need to feel present in their day-to-day lives and not be as distracted, including by marketing and advertising.
“We are demanding people’s attention as an industry on a day-to-day basis. But when people started talking about the future they wanted to live in, our devices and the things they spend their time on didn’t feel meaningful or valuable to them. They were all things that got in their way,” she says.
While older cohorts focused more on health and wellness, for 20- to 30-years-olds the desire was “to go from rushing to rest”, to avoid the rat race and to focus on the things that meant a lot to them.
Nature is healing
The desire to go from a sense of nature failing to nature flourishing was also evident, as was a wish to go from being harmful bystanders to healthy participants. “People were saying: ‘We want to be part of this transformation that we know needs to happen,’” says Costello.
“Nobody said their good life was hanging out in a shopping centre all day. They wanted to be enjoying the outdoors.”
Perhaps the biggest barrier to living their good life today, cited by almost half of all respondents, was simply not having the time or motivation to think beyond today.
It’s the nub of the challenge for the creative industries.
“How do we create inspiration for people to actually live the lives we want to live because, you know, we only get one shot at this thing,” she says.
In the main people found it easier to identify what they didn’t want in their future – social unrest, war, nature failing – than what they did. It is here that the creative industries can clearly help.
“Advertising as an industry is arguably the biggest engine of societal change in existence. We are the architects of desire,” she says.
Its concentration on getting consumers to “buy more stuff” leaves it – like so many other industries – fundamentally misaligned.
But advertising has a “superpower”, she says: its ability to tell compelling stories. Right now, that’s a power that should be used for the good, to help people envisage, and then realise, a better future.
“It’s not about treating people as consumers. It’s about treating people as citizens and inviting them to pay attention to the agency they have in their families, communities and across the country.”