A review of Everything Now from Dig Yorkshire.
If you’ve found yourself questioning why we have, need or want so much stuff, Steve McKevitt’s Everything Now gives us many credible, well-researched reasons as to why.
He is an expert in marketing, communications and branding with a roster if multinational clients over a 20 year career. Born in Liverpool and now based in Yorkshire the book is published by leading regional press, Route Publishing.
His skill in Everything Now lies in his rendering of the factual with the anecdotal that leaves one thinking, ‘so that’s how we got to here from there’. He gives cogent reasons as to why we do in fact have these concerns as to why we may still be dissatisfied, despite having ‘stuff’ all around us.
We presume to have ‘everthing now’ because we are led to believe that everything is always here now. McKevitt’s point being that we need to concentrate on the fact that certain resources are limited. Actually, will become no more. The inference being if we stop merely wanting, by extension we will be free from manufactured and illusory desires.
McKevitt uses UNICEF collected data and WHO figures that explain how the culture that we are living in now is a deliberate product of the last thirty years. All our needs have been met according to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, more than any previous generation. “But we are not happier”, McKevitt concludes.
He puts forward the idea that now the role of branding is to persuade us that we do not have needs but that we want something, like the latest Smartphones we are constantly proffered. “The solution is simply to demand something different”, he argues.
It’s not a post-oil apocalyptic vision that he has, and he does believe that science has the answers, he’s very optimistic. Through the combination of environmental, economic and political change with self-awareness of our lifestyle and mind-set the onset of social and personal crisis can be avoided.
Everything Now 