Time-space convergence and increasingly creative commercial marketing have brought us to their fingers. In the same process, they too, are at and under our very own fingertips. Everything’s just a touch of the screen and a swipe away. Worldwide consumerism and production lines work round the clock, satisfying our requirements, that of the average consumer. We hog our portable mobile phones, and they hog us. They are also known as the conmen of ultimate persuasion. The consumer is contrastingly, one of ultimate acceptance. Thus, forming a well equated pair. Nod your head, and go your way, right? Marketing strategies may understand us more than we understand ourselves. Playing on each one of us, on vulnerable locations of our brain to what then becomes habits of perceived to believed necessities. What do we learn from so much excess and accessibility? Possibly, happiness, satisfaction, frustration, debt, and longing. Playing games on the human psyche, the playground of the need for excess is highly-tuned and tested. Spritzed and scented in the allure of our believed necessity is a process of flattery. In the process of becoming flattering, we are very empty shells. You could liken this trait to an inflatable balloon: elastic principles and full of air. In all this air and excess, lives misery. Quoting a passage from Jamie Reid’s Suburban Press in 1972, “We are all going nowhere. No matter where we travel, our destination seems strangely like our place of departure. Wherever we look, we find various conditions of misery; at home, at work, and in all the places in between, we see the same void, we encounter the same emptiness. Our uneasiness with our daily lives is something we can’t avoid – while we may think we’re “different” from everybody else, we can’t help noticing that everybody looks the same in the crowds on our way to work. The poverty of urban life is not confined to the slum and ghettoes – it exists everywhere.”[1] Not only in our bank accounts but in our minds. It’s like a cultural and moral deficit. As one surfaces, attempting to understand how to wade through this all – How do individuals make sense of the consumerism we are made blind to? The capitalist society functioning on the one who owns less. Industries that suck us into the pits of their innards. Continuing Reid’s statement, “All of us share a vague feeling that everything that happens is beyond our control. The various occupations that distinguish us – workers, shoppers, students – are only so many roles. We don’t choose to live the way we do; it is forced upon us in many subtle (and not so subtle) ways.”[2] It feels like the necessities that are forced upon us which then become habits – are only so many ways of using our primitive instincts. More means survival, so let me collect all these goods and store them away. Normalising excess, therefore, is not a hardship but a task made easy by our very own primal instincts. Amass and you shall prosper. But the joke is on us, and we are the fools.
Reference
[1] Gorman, Paul. 2011. Jamie Reid Urged To Donate Artwork Cash To Occupy. 26 October . http://www.paulgormanis.com/?tag=point-blank.
[2] “Ibid.”
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