Imagine your world stripped down to a new minimalistic medium: your luxurious car and fine clothing taken away to start a fresh life. All that you were provided with is food, shelter, suitable clothing and good health. Could you find yourself to be happy with just these things? Though it seems an unsettling thing to comprehend, I hope you would find your answer to be yes. This article is not a crafty, underhanded attempt to con people into the complex world of Communism, it’s simply meant to show how much our culture relies on things for pleasure and gives us, in my view, a false sense of happiness.
We have all heard the ultimate consumer maxim: You can’t buy happiness yet we are inundated with constant messages from advertisements and the media claiming that happiness can be wrapped up in a bow and given to you if you simply buy their product. The yielding result is exactly what they want: mindless consumerism. We don’t have to think about what we really need or want in order to happily exist in this world, the ad agencies have already done that for us, and they are very good at their job.
We have become a nation of over consumers that have attached a meaningless value to most of our stuff. I’m not above the retail epidemic, this stream of consciousness was catalyzed when I was going through the process of purging my apartment of all of the useless crap that resides in it. At that point, the apartment wasn’t mine, it had become my stuff’s. It’s so very kind of my stuff to let me live there as a roommate, providing I didn’t take up too much of it’s space.
We’ve assigned so much clout to the things we buy. We honestly believe that the type of shoes or bags we wear really say something about who we are as individuals. It’s starting to feel as if we have this vision of what we want to be and how we want to project this image onto others. Instead of demonstrating ourselves by way of creativity and genuine expression we do it by adorning ourselves with certain clothes, accessories and toys. Though I suppose the supremely misinformed would say that wearing clothes is the best way to express oneself.
I’d feel much more comforted by the fact that I was in debt over accumulating drawers full of creativity, closets decked with philanthropy and shelves draped with Joie de vivre. I would hope that would give me much more of a rush than tooling around town with the latest Hermes handbag or pulling up to some 5-star restaurant in a fancy foreign sports car.
Take Fergie’s song Labels or Love, sure it’s just a song, but the message is a terrible one. Where perhaps it’s meant to be an empowering message to women everywhere, telling the listener that you don’t need a man to feel good when you always have Prada, Chanel, and other things to fall back on; I don’t think it justifies women’s strength. Do most of us take it literally? Probably not but the message is clear and it appeals to our generation a lot more than we realize.
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