MindStyleMagazine

Core
&
Care

Intro

Future Concept Lab

• Intro

The psychological need for care (taking care of yourself, other people and the environment that surrounds us) and the need to seek and establish new harmonies in our relationship with the world are concerns that dominate and will continue to dominate collective and individual life for many years. In order to avoid the risk of a profound rupture and in order to recharge one’s individual personal experience with precious vital energy a whole new strategy of balances is required, an approach that involves the most delicate dynamics of existence: the mind-body relationship, the nature-culture dynamic, the space-time coordinates and, in recent years, the real-virtual dialectic, with a careful eye focused on the core of experience. Managing these various levels of experience means focusing with increasing clarity one’s center of gravity on the effort to achieve fuller self awareness.
1. The psychological need for care and reintegrating or recharging one’s vital energies translates into taking care of oneself, other people and the environment.
2. Efforts are made to find new strategies of profound balance regarding the everyday dualities: body-mind, nature-culture, space-time.
3. The public realm is involved in the dynamics of cure, undergoing changes depending on the parameters and standards borrowed from the private sphere, in an endeavor to establish a new collective harmony.
4. The quest for silence and harmony with one’s environment is the form of inner peace that is assuming the characteristics of a new type of luxury.
5. The meaning of the slowdown lies in resisting an excessive degree of temporal acceleration, a condition that inevitably degenerates into an existential realm marked by a profound lack of meaning.
6. One is witnessing a renewed effort to place great value on non-working time: leisure time in which one may get to the bottom of things, a dream realm in which to recharge one’s energies and slowdown.
7. Leisure time is time for living: the representation of a mental and existential category in which silence and energy are inseparably linked with one another.
8. One is witnessing a hybridization between the dynamics of subjectivity and personalization / customization in the field of collective fruition.
9. The dynamics of sociability and participation are set into action by new parameters within the public sphere.
10. One is witnessing the opening of spaces for a new sort of soft hedonism applied to the sphere of the landscape: the value of sensoriality has finally made its way definitively into the collective dimension.

» from MindStyles Program 2002, by Future Concept Lab