The Rise of Hedonopolis

In 1975, My friend Jack and his colleagues predicted the future with an eerie accuracy.

Jack Sommer has a twinkle in his eye. It betrays a keen mind and an air of rascality. Yesterday, ole Jack had left me a couple of gifts. The first was a chart that matched ancient Vedic insights to modern scientific discoveries. The second was a paper he’d written with authors Abler, Jannell, and Philbrick from his days teaching at Dartmouth. The paper? “Fat City and Hedonopolis: The American Urban Future?” Note that this was published in 1975. I was two.

Turns out this fantastic four could have done without the question mark. Almost fifty years later, Sommer et al. came out looking like seers. Consider the abstract:

Among the possible futures of urban America, hedonism (ego-satisfaction) is the most likely. The search for recreational space is becoming a major aspect of human relations and urban and exurban land use as a greater proportion of personal and discretionary time is devoted to recreation. Two emerging urban types can be discerned: Hedonopoli are places where there is heavy investment in elaborate and complex leisure-pleasure personal services. Hedonopoli are formed by the coalescence of “fat cities,” whose changing land use reflects the shift from production to ego-satisfaction. Mobile parisitopoli are impermanent urban centers exploiting local source materials (such as fishing fleets and towns based on petroleum, mining, forestry, or military activities)….

Not bad, especially considering that it was in 1999 that Pine and Gilmore released The Experience Economy. Obsessed as we all were with the rise of the “knowledge economy” and the tech sectors, fewer have appreciated the rise of the recreation and amusement economies, such as they are. Nor has everyone come around to fully appreciating that this parallel sector helped fatten America.

In 1976-1980, the average weight of American adult men was approximately 172.2 pounds, and for women, it was about 144.2 pounds​ (24/7 Wall St.)​. By 2024, while exact average weights for this year aren't directly available, recent-years trends indicate a significant increase. Between 2015-2018, the average American man weighed 199.6 pounds and women weighed about 170.5 pounds​ (CDC)​.

But it’s the details in the paper that are really far-sighted in predicting hedonism:

First, among these is technological change, which allows more and more persons to achieve greater output in fewer working hours than ever before. The result is massive amounts of discretionary time. Second, increasingly refined transportation and communications technologies permit more flexible temporal and spatial utilization of the earth’s source materials, which also results in more efficient economic activities. Third, the shift away from flows of material toward flows of electronic messages induces a loosening of the actual spatial structure of our cities and spatial reorganization.

1975. These guys were science-fiction writers as much as seers.

They go on to discuss how these eventualities would allow people to focus more on ego gratification, which would see the rise of “hedonopoli.” They predicted that hedonism would overtake Puritanism in America, which it did.

They also predicted the rise of telework:

It will be less costly to business (and to society as a whole) to have many employees remain at their residences rather than journey into work. [Workers] with teletype terminals can work in their homes and thereby save transportation.

They forecast that so much time once spent on commuter trains would be able to rediscover their families. Too bad they didn’t foresee that the teletype terminals would gobble up most of that freed-up time—on, you guessed it, digital hedonism.

Other accurate predictions include:

• The reconfiguration of cities

• Changes in transportation access and patterns

• The proliferation of corporate restaurant chains

• The mix of prosocial and unsocial consequences

It’s a good time to reflect on this look into the future from 1975.

I say that particularly because I believe, given that people have outsourced so many of the functions of communities to the government and buy everything else through the App Store and Amazon, we are getting hungry for something more than mere amusement.

We are on the cusp of a new kind of economy—a Meaning Economy.

I can just imagine the twinkle in Jack’s eye rereading this again after fifty years.