AT THE end of a recent Sunday morning run, my companion disgorged a howl of primal rage into the glorious, blossom-kissed Tokyo sky.
He had forgotten, 10 hard kilometres earlier, to hit start on his Strava running app. Our exertions, he mourned, were wasted; the accomplishment hollow; the experience lost like tears in rain. Truly, as Socrates nearly said, the un-Strava-ed life is not worth living.
My friend’s fury is of our times. The cocktail of tech, social media and human competitiveness awakens an obsessive, constant hunger for self-quantification. Particularly where some sort of effort is involved. Measurement is meaning, and we are all trying to feed our step-count rings to get it.
This, then, is the gauge-addicted world into which Kokuyo, the 120-year-old Japanese stationery company, has launched Otona no yarukipen — a self-declared “micromotivation” device that measures how much handwriting you have done, with the option of pitting you against everyone else who owns one in a rolling online parade of progress.
At first sniff, Otona no yarukipen (adult motivation pen) has the feel of a thousand other forgettable Japanese gadgets that mean very little, even to their owners. But this is different. The device’s existence is owed to – and sharply highlights – two pieces of profound social change beyond the self-measurement fascination that has managed to gamify heart rates, REM sleep and staircases climbed.
Kokuyo’s elegant, rechargeable gizmo, roughly the size of a broad bean, clips on to pretty much any pen or pencil and is marketed to “those who have trouble sticking to goals”. It records how much time it has been in productive writing action. The engineers have worked to ensure it dismisses idle tapping and pen chewing as chaff, but logs real ink-to-paper slog as wheat.
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A tiny, inspirational light changes colour in 10 stages from white (the first few minutes) to blue (about two hours of activity). The device uploads the achievement to an app where your avatar stands on a long, winding road: its progress fuelled by your penmanship and set against thousands of others on their own journeys.
The version of the gadget made for grown-ups, which was launched last month, has been propelled on to the market by pure popular demand. The original Shukudai no yarukipen (homework motivation pen), introduced by Kokuyo six years ago, was aimed at encouraging children to study.
In the role of stick, yarukipen snitches to a parent on whether the allotted homework time was spent in serious writing toil. As carrot, it rewards achievement with a series of collectable stamps on the app.
The emergence of the homework yarukipen coincided with a record high for Japanese female labour force participation, and with steadily rising rates of working mothers and families where both parents work. The gadget does not pretend to sit in loco parentis, but plays (and exposes the demand for) a supportive supervisory role that modern Japanese households need.
Even more revealing is what happened next, when adults spotted that a self-measuring pen, in a rapidly changing economic era, could provide a powerful motivational jolt in their own lives. Kokuyo, under mounting pressure from adults to broaden the market, eventually did so. As well as making the 9,900 yen (US$69) machine itself altogether more suave looking, the adult version of the app rewards effort with bar charts, comparisons over time and a virtual path where you can out-write complete strangers as your competitive instincts kick in.
The question is: what on earth are all these Japanese adults writing by hand? The answer, Kokuyo says, is that a rapidly increasing number of people are using their spare time to “upskill” – the accumulation of qualification and certification that will allow them to move jobs.
Again,the country’s economy, in its emergence from decades of stagnant wages and deflation, is the critical factor: Japan’s is a labour market where the concept of lifetime employment in one company is no longer solid nor, for many, remotely desirable.
The labour market, partly assisted by more sophisticated recruitment apps, is becoming liquid in ways that seemed improbable just 10 years ago. Companies have yet to raise wages much above inflation, so more people are considering changing jobs as the only way to secure a rise. Adults are studying so they can quit and move on. The problem they have is that they must do this on the fringes of notoriously long, tough working days.
Motivation, for anything, is elusive. But as Kokuyo has revealed, the pen is mightier when it’s scored. FINANCIAL TIMES
