There was a news item I snagged for my research files a few years back about a Japanese trend for older people to hire actors to pretend to be family members and come and visit them. Interestingly, having paid all this money for the faux-family experience, typically the grandparents used the time on the meter to berate their pretend kids for not coming to visit them often enough.

That’s a lovely example of what happens when social changes crystallise around a particular group with economic freedoms but not the emotional experience they believe they’re due from family obligations. Societies change, in Japan and beyond, and some fascinating developments are outlined in the book Microtrends by Mark J. Penn with E. Kinney Zalesne.

The book is utterly fascinating, and if you’re at all interested in writing drama you can’t help but see the potential for stories to come out of the wealth of research that’s between its covers. Drama stems from conflict, and this book provides plenty of insight into the lifestyles that some of us are now leading. Cougars are a phenomenon I’d already heard of – successful career women in their 40s seeking younger playmates on their own terms – and this is the book that outlines the social and economic reasons for their existence. As I was reading the chapter on them, I realised that one key character in a story I’m working on could well be defined as a cougar, and the piece on them here usefully helped shape my thinking about who she is and what she does.

What about other subgroups though? Did you know that in America, more than 3.5 million couples are living apart much of the time thanks to having jobs far enough apart that the sensible thing is to maintain separate households? Think of the potential for stories that emerge straight from that fact. How do you keep a relationship alive when you’re spending so much time apart? Does absence make the heart grow fonder, or are evenings away a temptation to stray?

Further afield, 14% of marriages in South Korea were to foreigners in 2005, compared to 4% in 2000. A little poking around into that statistic, and you’ve got the makings of a film: you could feasibly have 2 marriages to foreigners within one family, and the upsets and surprises of being wedded to a European or American could provide plenty of story fodder.

A third of American cosmetic surgeons are dealing with requests to do work on both partners in couples, and the number of mother and daughter combos wanting assistance is increasing. And while Asia in general is anti plastic surgery, Korea has 1200 plastic surgeons, 300 more than California. Clearly something interesting is happening in Korea at the intersection of marrying foreigners and getting cosmetic surgery, and film is a good way to tell the story.

The above examples are just a few pulled out of a fascinating book. I’m all in favour of circulating widely to get experience of different social worlds, and Microtrends is a way of supporting that attitude with research breaking down trends around the globe into statistically significant social groups. If you’re at all interested in telling stories about the world we live in now, and the one that’s round the corner, I highly recommend that you pick up a copy of this book.