Wednesday 4 January 2017

I am not a money cow!

I am not a money cow, man, and object to being treated as one. We appear to be on and endless conveyor belt of consumption, no sooner has one purchasing opportunity passed, then another rears it's head, thrust before us. And of course, you're expected to participate, the media makes that quite clear, or you'll be different and you don't want to be different, do you? It's deplorable. The all pervasive pressure to continually consume the unwanted and unnecessary in pursuit of the material dream is damaging to us as individuals and collectively.  It's a multifaceted scourge of misery, dressed with enticing bling. We end up encouraged, no, pressured to spend too much, eat too much, get into debt, to participate in these norms and values of our society's events and activities you're told you 'must' participate in to be 'normal'.  Those exhibitions of gratuitous overindulgence shown in Christmas or Easter (substitute what ever event or festival) adverts reflect reality, don't they? No, they suggest that if you're not living like that then you must have failed or just missing out. Which is bollocks of course, but effective bollocks, as people flock to overspend on demand. And when we've messed up, overspent, eaten and drunk ourselves stupid, we're pilloried for our poor choices and lack of self control.  As the song says, 'it takes two baby'.  Yeah, we could exert more self control, but that would be a lot easier if we weren't constantly bombarded with pressure to consume. Sale after sale after sale, endless opportunities, must haves, adverts coming from every surface, speaker and screen.  Though all responsibility is removed from the purveyors, the sellers, the 'dealers', no, the ownness is all on us. What you see in the photo above is selling at its most cynical. We're being encouraged to buy products so in advance of an event (Easter is 15th of April) in the hope we'll consume them and have to buy more. Cynical fuckers! We need to take a stand, man, as Zamo said 'just say, no!'.

No comments:

Post a Comment