Categorization
For just about any industry you can imagine, there exist semi-formal trend cycles that seem to be sort of accurate at least part of the time.
Fashion is probably the most visual and well-known of these cycles, with garment-professionals planning their releases based on how long it takes for styles to arise, go out of vogue, and then eventually come back into style with some new monicker: the original “edgy” or “sexy” replaced with “nostalgic” or “quaint.”
Whatever the contemporary trend-defining adjective, though, if you can nail the cycle you stand a good chance of being in the right place at the right time more often than not.
There’s a similar rhythm at play in the technology world, usually referred to as the “tech adoption cycle.” This cycle, which is generally illustrated as a parabolic timeline, sorts the consuming public into five categories—Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority, and Laggards—and then provides horoscope-like “psychographic” profiles about the folks within these different groupings.
The development and utilization of this and other such sorting systems are far from an actual science.
They can helpfully gesture at collections of behaviors that tend to agglomerate in vague groups of individuals, but you’re unlikely to ever discover a pure Late Majority consumer, for instance, because we’re all incredibly complex people with countless inputs, heuristics, habits, backgrounds, traits, and triggers.
So while someone may seem to be a Late Majority technology consumer, they’ll almost certainly defy that label at some point or in some facet of their life, consequently rendering our other assumptions about them and how they behave, moot.
Broader, population-wide demographic categorizations are a little more reliable for most purposes, as they allow us to say there are this many Innovators, this many people in the Early Majority, etc, and each of these groups will behave roughly in this way, on average, much of the time.
It’s still not perfect, but it keeps us from making assumptions about any individual based on demographic information—which is good policy for many reasons—while also providing us with a semi-reliable sense of how groups of people behave, given a set of loose but pre-defined variables and sufficient historical data.
It can be useful, too, to ask ourselves where we fall on these and similar spectrums, even if it’s clear from the outset that the categorizations themselves are imperfect, and the insights they provide are only useful on scale.
Something I’ve learned about myself, for instance, is that I generally fall somewhere in the Innovator category when it comes to awareness of new technologies, but I probably straddle the line between Early Adopter and Early Majority when it comes to actually utilizing said technologies on a regular basis.
When I initially noticed this propensity, I asked myself if it was okay: if it made sense based on who I am, what I believe, and who I aspire to be.
Then—reassured that this propensity aligned with my ambitions and beliefs—I leaned into it, checking my environment more consciously for technologies and trends that seemed to fall into that chronological category, uncovering a slew of new, relevant options and opportunities, as a consequence.
Any attempt to sort an utterly complex individual into a simplified, convenient category should be questioned.
As long as we don’t take these categorizations literally or as absolute truth, though, it’s possible to find some value in them as loose collections of oft-correlated traits and behaviors, and as landmarks we can use to orient ourselves in the nebulous space between pre-existing, label-bearing personality types and divisions.
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Projects
This week on Brain Lenses I published an essay about Peripersonal Space and a podcast episode about The Stroop Effect.
This week’s episode of Let’s Know Things is about (the currently very relevant)mRNA Vaccines.
About a week-and-a-half into the project, I’m having a lot of fun curating and publishing Yesterday’s Newsletter each day :)
Interesting & Useful
Some neat things:
Infinite Bad Guy(very clever: seamlessly switch between all the Bad Guy cover videos on YouTube as the song plays)
Artificial Blooms(gorgeous digital flora)
15 African Artists on the Rise(some really compelling work on this list)
Wein Museum(online museum collection)
A Visual Guide to Banknotes Around the World(guide to the color of currency)
Vessel Finder(real-time, global ship tracking—pretty mind-blowing)
Journey to the Microcosmos(YouTube channel focused on microscopic imagery)
For more interesting things of this kind, subscribe to Curiosity Weekly.
![](https://s3.amazonaws.com/revue/items/images/010/206/913/original/6aad839c-7a5f-4b2a-96a4-9ef7dac3b7ed_4032x3024.jpeg?1626959112)
Outro
Since many of us are now entering Implied Compulsory Gift-Purchasing Season, a few quick things to consider:
Gifts are not the only or best way to show affection or love
The most-appreciated gifts are often things people actually need, rather than random surprises that mean well, but are ultimately not very practical or applicable to the person in question
A lot of the traditions we take for granted are relatively recent inventions, spread and reinforced by corporations that desperately want us to buy as many of their products as possible
And on a personal note, most of my favorite traditions with family and friends have nothing to do with consumption, and everything to do with the peculiarities of our circumstances and relationships; so consider inventing your own, case-dependent, relationship-optimized traditions instead of just following the well-worn path, this year
I have absolutely nothing against stuff, and in fact get tons of value from most of my possessions.
But the thoughtless acquisition of more things, for ourselves and for others, often leads to the opposite relationship with what we own, and the resources we spend on such items can usually be better applied to experiences, actual assets, and/or savings that provide up with more options and security, later.
What’ve you been up to this past week?
How’s your December, thus far, and have you made any plans for the rest of the year?
I love hearing from the people on the other end of these missives, so if you have a moment, consider sending me a quick (or thorough) email and telling me a bit about yourself and what you’re up to.
You can reach me by responding directly to this newsletter, or at colin@exilelifestyle.com.
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You can also communicate via the usual channels: Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or annual learned list.
If you’re finding some value in what I’m doing here, consider supporting my work by becoming a patron of my writing or Let’s Know Things, buying one of my books, or subscribing to Brain Lenses. You can also buy me a coffee.