Things to Think about
People don't need enormous automobiles, they need respect. They don't need closets full of clothes, they need to feel attractive and they need the excitement and variety and beauty. People don't need electronic equipment; they need something worthwhile to do with their lives. People need identity, community, challenge, acknowledgement, love, and joy. To try to fill these needs with material things is to set up an unquenchable appetite for false solutions to real and never-satisfied problems. The resulting psychological emptiness is one of the major forces behind the desire for material growth.
-Donella Meadows, Beyond the Limits
Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.
Tyler Durden, Fight Club
Tyler's guys may be figuring it out, but most of the world is still chasing the sausage. All these people around me, 50,000 of 'em at UT, going to school so they can get the highest paying job. Why? because that's what you do. I'm not trying to claim that I am enlightened, or that i don't want stuff. but i think i am a little closer to having my values straight.
David Timmer, GXU
This article I'm reading ("The Iron Maiden," Marketing Madness) is all about how women feel sooo bad about themselves all because of advertising. I think this is scapegoating, to avoid using vulgarities like "pure bullsh**." After all, they do it to guys too, but you don't see us bitching and moaning. i'm never gonna look like the calvin klein model with the cool eyes and the perfect smile, but i don't give a sh**. Ads feature our ideals of perfection because they want us to seek improvement, possibly through use of their product
-Me
UNFETTERED CREATIVITY IS
ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL
MANIFESTATIONS OF SUBVERSION
POSSIBLE, FOR IT OFFERS US ALL
A TASTE OF FREEDOM
The International Noise Conspiracy
Everything is black in the right light
David Timmer, GXU
One may build a compelling case that American culture is - beyond redemption - money-mad, hedonistic, superficial, rushing heedlessly down a railroad track called Progress. Tocqueville and other observers of the young republic described America in these terms in the early 1800s, decades before the development of national advertising. To blame advertising now for these most basic tendencies in American history is to miss the point. . . . The people who have created modern advertising are not hidden persuaders pushing our buttons in the service of some malevolent purpose. They are just producing an especially visible manifestation, good and bad, of the American way of life.
Stephen Fox, The Minor Makers: A History of American Advertising and Its Creators
More to come with inspiration
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