For most of us today materialistic
objects refer to the things we are made to believe we need in order to project
a certain satisfaction. Who is this agent that tricks us into this mindset,
what satisfaction are we trying to obtain, and what ramifications might this
have? I will seek to answer this by showing how advertising in our new world
leads to a lifestyle in which we are morphed into believing our lives are thus
insufficient.
Our first step into understanding
the ramifications of this consumerism is a book by Jane Hammerslough, called Dematerialized: Taming the Power of
Possessions. Hammerslough seeks to identify the social, spiritual, and
emotional attachment we seem to have to our possessions, and is directed at us
by advertisements. It is funny how this pattern has been going on for many
decades, and even centuries in some cases.
When we go back to an ancient text called “A Consolation of Philosophy”,
a man named Boethius is imprisoned and on death row. He is sulking because he
once was a very fortunate man in his latter years with wealth, fame, and
riches. Due to his philosophy, he was to be put to death. He writes this text in
prison where philosophy takes the place of a Lady and seeks to show him that
Lady Fortune can often be deceiving.
Often we see Lady Fortune take the
place of many material satisfactions. Other times we see her in the form of
lust, and we see her as a way to please ourselves through the items for sale at
markets, or the physical pleasures we witness upon the streets. Other times she
comes in the form of luck, or legitimate fortune. But others, she is a
deceptive queen.
Perhaps we should do the same as Boethius:
reflect on what fortune has done for us, and what it has done to us. In the
text, he discovers how he, much like consumers today, seek true happiness. They
seek satisfaction and according to what Maslow might called “Self Actualizing
Needs”. These are the things that truly matter to us and help us to identify
who we really are in our hearts and minds. These things can only be discovered
if we communicate with the people who means the most with us and if we actually
make an effort to search for that part of ourselves which we seek to identify.
Identity seems to be the key. As
stated before, this 90210 setting that producers want us to be surrounded by is
the image and the identity they want us to have. When you have movies on the
Disney channel, you see big, magnificent high schools with hip kids, and
everyone is cool, they’re all happy go lucky and at the end of the day, we all
get along. This is not so in the real world. We are ambushed at the Wal-Mart
checkout lines by the latest celebrity news as if it is supposed to be relevant
in our daily lives. It is portrayed in pictures and in commercials, magazines,
ads, emails, news papers, news reports, radio talk show, reality television,
books, movies, and every other venue of communication and networking! It is a
world we are forced to accept as truth. The nature of these advertisements is
to throw all these things upon us; the latest clothes, cars, shoes, you name
it, and make us feel like “You don’t have it? Wow, you’re a loser.”
The worst part is, we believe it. If
you aren’t wearing Chuck Taylor Converse All-stars, skinny jeans with a chain
from your wallet to front pocket, a v-neck t-shirt and a button up sweater,
your not “hip to the jive”, you are “out of it”, or maybe your just plain
weird. So we buy these things. We all get the touch screen phones, we get in
our nice new cars, and we talk funny, walk funny, and do things the way we see
it in the perfect worlds that we don’t want to be left out of—the worlds that
don’t even exist.
And if you are overweight, then you
aren’t pretty. That’s what they want you to believe. Grey haired men aren’t
silver foxes, they’re old. So what do we do? Color our hair and get botox
injections. We pay for expensive implants and everyone changes their body to
make themselves look like they’ve never grown up. They’re creating a Never-Land,
and we are buying into it. So we ask ourselves, how do we dematerialize? How do
we, as Hammerslough puts it “tame the power of possessions”? Boethius gives us
this answer. You have to step back and see what Lady Fortune has done for you.
Has she tried to seduce you and make you lustful of her? Are you seeking the
gifts and fruits she has? Fame, wealth, or material pleasures?
This inquiry into why we do things
this way is often where we find ourselves answering our own inquiries. We find
satisfaction in answers that portray lifestyles that are similar to that on
television. As we see new trends set in, our material lives that we currently
have become less and less sufficient, and we continue to seek greater
satisfaction. It is a wonder how we as people ever have any sort of
satisfaction. We find comfort in buying things. As a society, advertising has
morphed our people into a people of buying, and not of production. It is no
wonder that in the United States, over the last two decades, we have bought six
trillion dollars more from the rest of the world than we have sold back to it. It
is a spending habit that we cannot control either on a personal level, or on a
national scale. We believe these materials, these constituent elements, are
vital to our survival, which is not so. Our society has not grasped the concept
of delayed gratification, or the process of purposefully not buying something
to further our efforts and strife.
Rather than rewarding ourselves for
simple things with grand gifts simply because we can or want to, we ought to
look at delayed gratification. In this sense, we actually assess what
constituent elements we need, and which ones we don’t need. Our failures and
successes come of what we see in ourselves, and what we attempt to become.
Everything we do makes up who we are, they make up our constituent elements.
Our materials seek to define who we are. It just depends who you are going to
be seduced by Lady Fortune, and her lustful, deceitful beauty. The alternative?
Dance with her when offers the graceful opportunities, but don’t always fall in
love at first sight.
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