Sunday, January 20, 2013

This product is habit forming

Everything we have ever experienced has happened inside our heads. Every time we "feel" something in our hands, it's really just electrical impulses being sent from our hands to our heads, and decoded there. And et cetera with many other systems in our body. But, this is a bit too clinical for the point I want to make. Consider this:

You go into a restaurant and order a burger. You probably think something like "This is disappointing. I don't like lettuce. That waitress is hot. I should have gone to..." and so on.

We take literally almost everything around us for granted, habitually. When is the last time you really looked at your own room, for instance? We always walk into our room, accept that it's our room, and go about our business. When last did you take a moment to appreciate that cleaning you did last week? Or look at how messy your desk is? Or enjoy how the walls softly reflect the light from your lamp? If you're like most people, you almost never do these things.

This is called "habituation". We get used to things, and then ignore them and carry on to other things, which we then get used to. This is an absurd and beautiful world we live in, and most people spend their time not paying attention to large parts of it.

Our brains evolved to deal very well with changes. We are creative and flexible. We observe changes, analyze them, and draw conclusions about the world. But, once we see something say, 50 times, it becomes part of the "background" of our lives. Buildings, trees, roads, billboards, carpets, wallpapers, furniture, the sky, music, many of us will disregard these things until they somehow change.

We think of everyone we pass on the way to, say, the cereal aisle, as just "extras". They are background noise, we walk past them, looking straight ahead, careful not to look them in the eye or make any gesture deemed inappropriate or offensive. Perhaps we nod our head, perfunctorily, upwards if it's someone we are comfortable with, downwards if it is someone we don't. The most loquacious of us will proffer a "Hey." or a "How's it going"?

We are, in effect, isolating ourselves from other human beings because they aren't "new" or "change-y" enough for us.

We can choose not too, though. It's a choice of paying attention to not only the "little things", but everything around us. Everything is, of course, an exaggeration, but we can drastically shift our focus. It is proposed that we can focus on 126 bits of information per second, and something like having a conversation takes about 1/3rd of these.

How much of your headspace are you wasting? How much attention are you paying to what kind of cereal you're looking for, and how much are you spending on interacting with the world, the actual world, around you? Are you really enjoying things, or are you just thinking about enjoying them?

There is this wonderful synergy that comes from being totally in sync with the world, or as I like to think of it, having your shit together. When you spend less time thinking and more time completely engrossed and enraptured in what you're doing, and the things you're seeing, and the people around you, and how absolutely beautiful Jupiter when it's right next to the moon, it is so much easier to feel the reality of things: we are all just little pieces of the world. Or, you could be daydreaming about that cute guy who sits in front of you in class, walking ahead with your head buried in Facebook, oblivious to the people and things and all of the beauty of the world around you. It seems like an easy choice to me. Perhaps not so easy to accomplish, but something to strive for.

Saturday, January 12, 2013

100% Cotton

In the late 1940's, a man named Edward Bernays came to prominence in many well-to-do (read: political and business) circles in America. Mr. Bernays was the nephew of the "father" of psychology, Dr. Sigmund Freud. Now, WWII had just come to an end, and was left of Europe/America/Asia was trying to pick up the pieces and learn from the atrocities of the war.

I know this is starting to sound like a history lesson, but bear with me.

Now, Mr. Bernays, influenced by his own work as an Allied Propagandist, the horrors of the war, and the ideas of his Uncle Freud, decided that situations such as the rise of the Nazis and Hitler, were inevitable, due to the innate and unconscious desires driving the human mind...
That is, UNLESS these primal desires, such as lust, greed, and fear, along with other drives in the "Id" were kept in check. This is, of course, easy to carry out in a totalitarian government, but the downfalls of this were readily apparent in the rubble of the WWII.

The solution, then?
An admittedly elegant one.

Bernays invented "Public Relations", through which he designed and espoused new methods of advertising products. Specifically, he strove to link these products to the "unconscious urges" of the American public. This would both keep the population controlled, avoiding groupthink and the exploitation of the masses, and make a number of people, Bernays included, very very rich.
To elucidate, prior to the rise of the ideas of Mr. Bernays, nearly all advertising was carried out based on the merits of the product in question:
"This shoe is well-built, moderately cheap, and will last you for years to come!"
After Bernays, the focus shifted dramatically:
"Look at these happy and attractive people. They drive nice cars, do fun things, and have better lives than you. Look how happy they are. They also wear Levi's."
Sexual desires, desires to be happy or successful, desires to be liked, etc, these all became the main point of advertising a product.

Moving right along to point number two:

To survive and be effective, a Capitalist economy must continue to grow. The economic slump we are arguably in or not in is a result of a Recession. That is to say, the economy is still growing, it is just doing it more slowly than we'd like. The severity of our Recession (and the Great Depression) shows that if a free-market economy such as ours begins to shrink, the effects are absolutely devastating.

Do you see the conflict here yet? I'll continue.

When Mr. Bernays began to appeal to our desires in marketing, that is, desires to be young, sexy, and liked, not our desires for the product in question, he opened up Pandora's box. The deep-down and scary bits of humanity are now the focus of our consumption. We don't buy things that we want, we buy things that have been associated with things we want, like being young or sexy or rich. To keep our economy moving, then, we have to continually buy things we don't actually want. If you don't buy more and more of the things you don't actually want, the economy crashes and very bad things happen to everyone.

Things don't make us happy, really, but now that it is commonly accepted practice to market them as if they would, we must respond in turn and purchase them as if they would, to keep the economy healthy. Now, of course, we have to buy the things we don't want. How do we pay for them? We work for people we don't like. We spend 40 hours a week with people that we don't value nearly as much as our friends or family. We sacrifice meaningful human interaction for a paycheck. Shall I summarize?
The great majority of us work too hard to pay too much for things we don't actually want and that won't make us happy and, in doing so, we often are too busy to really open up to people and have meaningful and genuine interaction with them. It's no small wonder that it takes most people having a "Midlife Crisis" to realize that we are doing nothing of any value with our lives.

But here's where it gets even better:
Personally, I try to be very deliberate and limited in my consumption; I don't buy things that I don't want, nor do I buy things based on their advertisements; I don't watch TV; I enjoy buying used things when I have the opportunity to. I do all of these things because I don't want to participate in a system that I feel bullies myself and others into buying useless things.
Naturally, the word for a person such as myself is "Hipster"; I'm just "too cool" for that "mainstream" bullshit. We have bought into this system so much that we, not entirely unseriously, ridicule people who object to it. Why?

We all want to be happy.
We have been raised being completely surrounded by ads that show us that happiness is attached at the hip to products, we see happy people driving BMW's, drinking Coca-Cola, wearing Nike's, and so on and so forth.
We have been inundated with this mindset since we are children. It isn't true; but we want it to be. We get jobs and start to buy things, but we don't feel any happier, so we work harder, buy more things, and still don't feel any different. Then we see some damned dirty hipster who doesn't value the things that we do, and we get upset. Why should they be happy? I worked hard for these things, I've earned it. They haven't worked a day in their life, what gives them the right, they haven't earned their happiness!

I'm not going to pretend that I have "it all" figured out; not by a long shot. But consider this:
Most things will not make you happy. There are always exceptions, things we personally value very much, our passions, that can help us be happy. But the things that we see advertised often are not our passions. We don't want them, we just want to be happy and don't know how else to do it. Most of our generation will agree on the statement "Most things won't make you happy", but many of us are still unhappy. Because our entire lives we have seen our desires associated with products, with things to buy, we have been habitually manipulated through advertisements to the point that we are no longer entirely sure how to realize these desires through people, not products.

Everyone wants to be happy. Everyone wants genuine and meaningful human interaction. So fucking do it already. Don't make small talk while checking your facebook on your iPhone; look someone in the eye and talk about something beautiful. Don't go to the movies or the mall; go to the park with your friends. Stop wanting things and start wanting people. Sad? Don't eat a pint of ice cream or go "therapy shopping" or go onto xbox live; open up to a human being, be weak, share your vulnerability and fear, because everyone is just as vulnerable and afraid as you are, we're just forgetting how to tell each other. Turn off your television, you're not going to "miss" anything. You are a human being. You don't need iPhones or Xboxes or Tom's shoes or yoga pants or clothes; you need other human beings. Need them to be honest and imperfect and vulnerable, need them to be human, need to be human together, with them. Don't buy a new outfit, make a new friend and keep them forever.

Just, please, think about this. I'm not asking you to be Thoreau and move to the woods, only that you stop wasting so much time on objects that will never make you a happier or better person. If you have the courage to express your desires through people, to be genuine and honest and imperfect, people will value you and respect you. If you are not afraid to be weak, or be emotional, or be honest, others will stop being afraid to do the same to you. If you stop watching TV, you'll start watching people, and you may like what you see.
We all want to be happy, we just need to show each other how again.

Sunday, January 6, 2013

Living Deliberately

Many people are unhappy.
Many people feel as if they are lost, or they are on autopilot, or they are merely floating through life.
Many people make decisions that they don't really care about, either way, but they make them because everyone else says that these decisions are good.
Why is this?

We live in a society that is, among other things, very good at distracting us.
We have social media, shopping malls, television, radio, and many other things that would be too tiresome to list.
These things are all great fun, which is why so many people use them.
But, on the other hand, it seems that most of us feel like we are not in control of our lives.
We feel like we are being trapped, but we aren't sure where the cage is.

The solution to this is deliberateness.
By this I mean really thinking about every choice you make, no matter how petty, and being present in its actions.
This is almost like the Buddhist idea of Mindfulness. Mindfulness is the concept of being fully present in and aware of each passing moment, and not clinging to any ideas of good or bad about it; just observing the moment and letting it pass into the next.

I said that this culture is good at distracting us, but that doesn't mean that it is possible to be not distracted and still operate within it's bounds.
Set limits for yourself, and adhere to them.
For example, don't just go to the store. Be deliberate, exercise control, go in knowing what you are going to buy, and buy only those things. Don't spend three hours wandering in the mall, store to store. You are being distracted by new clothes and advertisements into doing something you didn't actually want to do.
This is, of course, exactly what those things are meant to do; lure you into buying them, or at least consider them.

This kind of behavior transfers over into many aspects of living.
Essentially, it boils down to being passively or actively engaged with the world.
Someone who is passively engaged will look at what's before them, such as an ad, a store, a rack of clothes, a life decision, and decided on a course of action.
Someone who is actively engaged will make a decision, and then seek the means to carry it out.
For example, Passiveness would be perusing through a store, looking at a rack of clothes and, after much deliberation, buying a jacket that looks nice, while Activeness would be going to the store to buy a jacket, buying the jacket, and leaving.

This world is full of people who love to make choices for you. You will drink Coca Cola or Pepsico products, You will eat Chiquita bananas, You will drive a Ford, Toyota or Honda, You will either go to University or start a career, and so on.
Our lives are becoming more and more pre-determined.
For the most part, they follow the model of:
Be born, spend the first five years of your life in the care of parent(s), attend school, while living at home, until you are roughly 18, at this point you either a) start working or b) go to college and then start working, work until you have put in enough time or have enough money to retire, retire, enjoy a few years of leisure, then die. There are a few variations, here and there, but linear flow describes the vast majority of American people's lives.
Furthermore, our choices in entertainment are, mostly, what's on the radio or tv.
Our choices for food are, for the most part, whatever is at the supermarket or fast-food.
Our choices for clothes are, for the most part, whatever is being sold at whichever store we prefer.
It's no wonder we feel like we have no control.

Now, I'm not saying to ditch the system and go be a hermit in the woods.
Just make your own goddamn decisions.
There comes a time in everyone's life where they ask themselves
"Do I REALLY prefer Coke, or have I not given Pepsi enough of a chance?"
People fall into this rut of buying what they see on TV, and eating what they see in the store, and we are beginning to forget that we DO have a choice in this.
We, at any time, can refuse to participate in any aspect of culture, or society.
But, we first have to realize these conflicts and make a decision about them.
You have to be willing to ask yourself
"What do I want out of life? What do I want to eat or wear or watch? Where do I want to work? What is important to me?"
And so many people don't.
We get to be maybe 20 and then realize that we have no fucking clue what we want to do with our lives, because we have been told our whole lives what to wear, and where to shop, and how to think, and we never questioned it.
Don't make that mistake.

The most important step to take, at first, is being deliberate in your actions.
Don't just aimlessly surf channels, tune in to the show you want to watch, watch it, then turn off the TV.
You will find you have more time, you will be more confident and happy in your choices, and it will start to feel like you have some control over your life.
It is tough, and tedious, to ask yourself questions everyday, to be actively engaged in the world.
But being passive seems to lead to this inevitable angst, apathy, and feeling of being lost in a stormy sea.
Be active. Make decisions and be proud of them, no matter how small they are. Be willing to ask yourself how you want to live you life, and be willing to live that way.

Live deliberately, in the face of millions of people and billions of dollars that want to make your decisions for you.
For what is a human being if he is deprived of free will?