As you just saw, matching your digital value propositions to our personality traits goes a long way toward motivating us, your audience and customers, to engage with it. We each need to feel that your meme “is for people like me,” which is a key survey question in brand research and one that indicates that you’re doing well at disposition matching. If your meme doesn’t make us feel this way, we move on, looking for those that do.

The same can be said of developmental stages, the next most stable form of human differences. Whereas our personality traits stay the same throughout our adult lives, developmental stages represent the tendencies and existential focithat change as we mature (Figure 12-1).

Figure 12-1. Our chronological age is a predictor of the existential questions we face at different life stages, which produce diverse interpretations of the same experience.

The richest definition this was given to us by Erik Erikson around 1959, one of the first developmental psychologists to pay attention to the entire lifespan from the cradle to the grave. ⁱ His idea was that we pass into and out of all-consuming existential questions as we age, somewhat like we drive into and out of radio broadcasts on a long road trip. The deep questions we ask ourselves about the direction our lives are headed start off as being of little concern, but slowly become critical to us, and afterward simply fade in importance as they are resolved and we mature out of them. The eight Eriksonian questions(with approximate ages and percentages of the U.S. population) adapted for our uses here are as follows:

• 1. Can I rely on others? 0-1 years; 2%

• 2. Can I do it myself? 1-2 years; 2%

• 3. Am I good or bad? 3-5 years; 2%

• 4. Am I good at something? 6-12 years; 12%

• 5. Who am I? 12-19 years; 10%

• 6. Can I share my life? 20-39 years; 30%

• 7. Do I matter? 40-64 years; 30%

• 8. Can I die in peace? 65+ years; 12%

Don’t let the brevity of this list fool you into underestimating how profound it is. Erikson’s life stages read like the acts of an epic film, and the deeper you dive into any one of them, the more a world of human drama opens up.

We begin life born developmentally premature compared to other mammals (the fault of our huge crania, which at first we can’t even lift off the floor). In our first year as we go from helpless to walking, we either learn we can trust others to survive (question 1), or we learn that we’re on our own. Establishing our social network may be our first life lesson. (At the same time, our parents learn whether they are up to the job of being caregivers.) But on the heels of learning to trust others, and now literally up on our own heels, we next demand autonomy (question 2), using our brains and muscles as they come online to do what they were made for. (Learning collectivism is immediately followed by learning individuality.)

Now we are acting beings, doing things, going places, running, and we instantly collide with the morés of our culture, its dos and don’ts, rights and wrongs, and insistence on where we can and cannot make a mess. So we next become obsessed with whether we are good or bad (question 3), and no one lets us go a day without facing that question. Coming into our tween years, most of us resign ourselves to being good, but now we want to be good at something (question 4), so we constantly make up games and compete and measure ourselves against our peers. Soon all these skills and competencies and preferences begin to (question 5) coalesce into an identity and we find we must answer the question of who we are, trying on and discarding identities as fast as we change clothes, cliques, and hair color. (This is perhaps the worst life stage to get a tattoo, albeit the most common.)

Overlapping this stage in a fundamentally frustrating way, we also begin to wonder if we can be with someone else forever (question 6), to find true love, and our life becomes defined by the edict that you can’t love another until you find yourself, neither of which we have mastered. Then one day the question of staying with someone forever, once such a seeming impossible mountain to ascend, is suddenly the status quo and we enter the longest stretch of our lives where we spread genes and memes and try to help them survive and propagate as we help ourselves stay relevant and to matter (question 7).

Then into retirement we go, consumed with the question about whether our time, our work, and even our kids are worthy enough to make us proud that we used our mortal days on them (question 8). We satisfy our omissions and rectify our commissions in an existential battle to replace regret with fulfillment, and we help others at an earlier stage on the same journey, hopefully coming to feel okay about the eventual end.

That may be a long-winded description, but it is still an insultingly pared-down account of the life and struggles of humans. Nevertheless, Erikson was firmly on point, and here’s the point for you: these eight questions are your first guide to knowing what content is rewarding to us. We want content and products that help us answer the existential question of our development stage. And we’ll pay for it with our attention and our money.

Your task is simple: locate your users on this list by their age, then adapt your messaging to align with the existential question that they are thinking about morning, noon, and night. Here are the Eriksonian questions again with the companies that do just that (keeping in mind that the buyer for products at the first four stages are more often a caregiver than the user):

• 1. Can I rely on others? Pampers, Carter, Graco

• 2. Can I do it myself? LEGO, Crayola, Melissa & Doug, Baby Einstein, LeapFrog

• 3. Am I good or bad? Disney, Marvel

• 4. Am I good at something? Nike, Gatorade, Sprite, PlayStation, Xbox

• 5. Who am I? Vineyard Vines, Apple iTunes, Facebook

• 6. Can I share my life with another? Match.com, eHarmony, Tinder, David’s Bridal, The Knot

• 7. Do I matter? University of Phoenix, Microsoft, Forbes

• 8. Can I die in peace? Ancestry.com, Expedia, AARP, Carnival Cruises

The internet has proven essential to answering every one of those questions with content and services.

The first question, can I rely on others?, is actually the most interesting, because we face it both at the beginning of life (as an infant) and at the time life repeats itself (as a parent). Within minutes of learning we are expecting a child, many of us find ourselves on Google searching what others can teach us. Or we grab our phones and text our social support network, in essence seeking assurance that they’ll be there for us. Thus, at the same moment a new baby asks us if he or she can rely on us, we’re turning to our close intimates and the wider internet and asking if we can rely on them.

The best toys answering the next question, can I do it myself?, are those that enable children to learn about their own capabilities. Cheap computing power has produced generations of interactive electronic toys sold to caregivers with the almost irresistible value proposition that they will provide their children with educational stimulation, a claim more often made than tested. But aside from filling landfills with non-rechargeable batteries, many of these toys lie around unused while children spend hours playing with a string of beads, a strip of cloth, or a stick. How do computerized toys end up less engaging than a stick? The answer might be that any toy that requires programming is a closed systemlimited to a few types of input and some pre-determined outputs, whereas non-programmed toys are open systems with unlimited inputs and outputs, not to mention malleable rules the kid can change on a whim. The point is that children at this stage want to learn what they can do, not what the toy can do, and thus a simple open-system toy will still answer this life question best. Watch for this struggle as consumer robotics evolve, with LEGO following the successes of Furby and Aibo by making more investments in toy robots with artificial intelligence. ⁱⁱ The moment a child is observed to tell a robot toy “no, let me do it” like they have told so many parents over the millennia, we will know the robotics have gone too far. At the very least, we can expect the robot to be lying unused in the corner the next day—another meme killed by user-selection.

One can scarcely overstate the number of movies, cartoons, video games, and animations that engage children obsessed with the next life-stage question, am I good or bad? A dead giveaway is the size of the characters—small good protagonists (Powerpuff girls, Pikachu, Sonic) facing grown-up sized or larger evil opponents, overcoming the obvious power differential with fantasy skills and capabilities. Sounds like the world of a child. Why don’t the good characters just remain in their magical powered-up state all the time? Because they must return to the size that resonates with child viewers, only to repeat the storyline again and again.

When asking themselves am I good at something?, children have traditionally looked to physical skills and sports. But increasingly, virtual skills in video games have been shown to answer this existential question perfectly well. They also conform to the fantasy of an extraordinary hidden power able to be unleashed any time circumstances warrant. Just as news content didn’t need physical paper to be delivered, and music didn’t need vinyl, skills don’t require a physical ball, field, goal, or uprights. By 2013, children were filling arenas watching video sports and logging hours watching Twitch just as their parents watched NFL in the other room.

The year 2016 saw the first collegiate e-sports scholarship s in the United States at Robert Morris University, who offered e-athletes the same deal as the basketball and football players, but also made them practice just as hard. ⁱⁱⁱ Winning is winning to those of us faced with this existential question—the gymnasium is incidental.

Some brands at some points in time—like Apple or Volkswagen or Death Row Records—are so strong that we use them to answer the fifth question, who am I?, regardless of what the product is. I’m a Mac … and I’m a PC. The theme of a wildly successful Apple ad campaign early in the millennium spoke the language of adolescents so well that many Gen-X and Gen-Yers defined themselves by their operating systems. A well-worn marketing strategy leveraging this identity question is to first convince urban youth to adopt your product, and then cross over to the far more numerous kids in the suburbs who aspire to be that cool. Tommy Hilfiger and Burberry were stagnating as clothes for tennis players until they perfected this motion. Interestingly, sometimes meme-makers fight in vain against the who am I implications of buying their product. ^iv In 2006, representatives of Louis Roederer, makers of Cristal champagne selling at $300 a bottle, became aware that their product had become the drink of choice among the hip-hop elite in, for example, the VIP sport lounges run by Jay Z, entertainer and executive of Def Jam records. Cristal still thought of itself as the “oldest cuvée de prestige in the Champagne region,” made originally for Tsar Alexander II in 1876, so it resisted becoming the moniker of the new “bling lifestyle” and said so. ^v A boycott ensued, some hip-hop stars bought Dom and Krug instead, and everyone eventually settled back into an acceptable answer to the question, who am I?

Polls taken in 2014 showed that the first thing nearly 30% of newlyweds did after getting married was to change their relationship status on Facebook, ^vi in this way answering the who am I question as someone who can share my life with another. Relationship building needed the internet more than anyone realized, and the internet delivered.

The Pew Research Center reported in 2016 that 22% of Americans aged 24-35 used online dating, and of the married people at that time, 5% had met online. ^vii Internet dating was one of few online verticals whose user base actually grew younger over time, rather than older. But what about everyone who was only halfway through this stage and not ready to answer yes to this Eriksonian question? The internet provided for them as well. By 2013, about 12% of all Americans were telling Pew they enjoyed adult content online (about 25% of men watching any online video at all). ^viii Many people wondered if these figures were too low due to falsifying, and Pew had asked the question a half-dozen different ways, not finding a radically different percentage since 2005. Perhaps the reason only a sixth of Americans are found to enjoy porn is because only a third are in the developmental stage where they are preoccupied with mating (broadly defined).

What kind of content appeals to people preoccupied with the seventh question, do I matter? This book. A book about how to make your memes matter to more people. As with every business bestseller and online article containing the words innovation, disruption, or digital revolution. Those of us in this developmental stage also cannot resist the various “influencer scores” as found on Klout, LinkedIn, or Bing. These are some of the cheapest-to-produce memes, easily derived from SQL queries or network algorithms and able to be tacked on to almost any digital product, and they are like catnip to those of us in this stage. We want our tweets to be trending, to be an influencer on LinkedIn, have a high author rank on Amazon, and have more views on YouTube. And when we want those digital status symbols and metrics to be even higher, we pay real money for conferences, trainings, and university degrees.

In the last stage, as we ask can I die in peace, research has indeed shown that we will suffer more regret from the noble things we did not do (omissions) than from the ignoble things that we did do (commissions). ^ix The internet and mobile computing have made it so easy to travel the world and fulfill our “bucket list” that we can’t blame lack of information for our regrets of omission, though we too often can blame a lack of resources.

But those of us with too little funds to travel can now bring the world to us instead, offering up our couch to travelers from other continents eager to book it (the site Airbnb derived its name from air-bed and breakfast, confirming you don’t have to have much to join the fun). As well, genealogy sites like Ancestry.com were early successes on the web; when social media went mainstream, we could connect with living relatives as easily as those of the past.

The point of all of these examples for meme-makers like you is that if your brilliant idea for a digital product doesn’t meet one or more of these existential needs head on, it might fall through the barstools and founder. Consider pivoting your product and your positioning to nail these—you’ll sell more and actually help people on their way.

Another key lesson is that you need to tune up the age group you’re advertising to, matching it to your product. If you’re trying to push content too early or too late for your audience’s existential focus, you’ll be no more successful that trying to turn back time.

For there is an intimate relationship between matching these existential questions and the attention that we’ll devote to your work, our all-powerful weapon of user selection. We—who consume your content and use your memes—we need to hold a high bar, since every hour we spend with you has an opportunity cost and risks the regret of not doing something else. The user selection pressure we apply to your inventions stems not just from the scarcity of our attention, but also the scarcity of our years. We will need to look back and say those hours, days, and years on social media, or gaming platforms, or acquiring status symbols (degrees, account balances), or publishing our thoughts (from top ten lists to TED talks), or staring at an iPad or into Oculus Rift…were worth it. Content is king, but more importantly, content is human. Disposition matching is as much about humanizing us, helping us, and viewing our lives and needs as richly as possible, as it is about spreading memes.