Follow the micro-trend

Read a review on Mark Penn's books entitled 'Microtrends Squared' and thought it will be a book worth reading. In the book the author lists 50 observations which in his words are ' new forces driving today's big disruptions'. Micro trends unlike macro trends are small forces which quietly redraw the norm of living ie. changes that are increasingly noticeable in everyday living. He categorises them into 6 groups, namely love and relationship, health and diet, technology, lifestyle, politics, work and business. The reviewer of the book thinks that many of these trends seem relevant to Singapore. In fact I notice such trends myself and can even relate to some of them.

One of the micro trend on relationship is that a greater percentage of husbands are playing 'second-fiddle' in the bread winning role in marriage. Now personally I experienced that before my retirement ie. if you consider yourself earning more than your husband by 20 to 30% but with him footing the big ticket expense items and you channelling money into reserves as fitting the second fiddle description. In retrospect I think I was wise to let him pay the big items to preserve the traditional provider role that a man wants to fulfill whilst being part of the changing trend of achieving wives..

Other than the trend of remaining single another observation the author made is that even married couples are living 'independent' parallel lives or sleeping in separate rooms. This excites me because I have harboured thoughts of sleeping in another room to get some real sleep without interruption from the snoring half. I will feel less guilty if that is fashionable, really. In fact visiting someone's small condo the other day made me feel how good it is to stay on your own with your own living space and then returning to a headquarter for meals and socialising with family. 

Just another interesting trend that tickles me is the growing fixation with pets. In my case I won't call it a fixation but I dutifully give my Miaomiao an organic aloe vera (from my garden) scrub weekly and my husband feeds it lemon grass (also from the garden) every morning. Yesterday night I was awakened by screams of cat fights and had to scramble out of bed to shoo away a stray cat lurking outside my gate. Well if that is not part of the emerging weird micro trends, what is?