Bad Ads
Advertising
1. People following their own, deep down desires is passion, and that is beautiful.
2. Advertisements meddle with our true desires and manipulate us into wanting artificial, man made wants.
3. Why do we listen to advertisements?
Random Fact About my Day: I saw Little Miss Sunshine last night. It is like the Odyssey but with a strange family. My friend thought the family learned to love one another through the adventure. I on the other hand, argued that, perhaps, we simply learned to understand the love that already existed in this strange family. I could see the caring from the beginning as I live in quite the strange family myself.
I often wonder if the world I live on is heaven, then I see a commercial on TV and realize that I still have a ways to go.
There are very few values in my life that remain consistent. I find one of these strong values is an severe distaste for Advertisements.
Let me define advertisements:
An advertisement is a man made media that manipulates the mind into wanting something, intentionally.
In a Zen way, I believe in today’s society (especially America’s society) needs to drift away from materialistic wants. Now if you really, really want those $200 jeans, well I support you in that quest. But the fact is, in today’s society, it is very hard to have real wants as the media fills our minds with artificial desires.
Now exactly why are man made desires so bad? Well, I would like to argue that real, innate desire is what is beautiful about life. The concepts of passion, love, and motivation all come from this inner desire., and that is what is so great about being human. We have something pushing us, something worth living for.
Well now the problem is, our deep down internal desires do not necessarily revolve around drinking Pepsi or driving Hondas.
So advertisements are designed around shifting this desire. And it works. It’s amazing how easily we can be taught to want something. Think back to when you were a kid. Do you remember a specific toy you just always wanted? Mine was Teenage Ninja Turtles. Now I did not really understand why I wanted them, I wasn’t into “pretending to fight” for hours on end. But I remember going to Wal-Mart and nearly crying if I could not get one. Why did I have this “deep down” desire? Because I saw commercials on TV telling me I wanted it.
Now just to reemphasize that example, if I had not seen the Ninja Turtle ads, what would I have desired as a child. Where would my passion lie?
You can take this dislike advertisements to a much higher level. I’m a social libertarian at heart. A perfect society for me is one where people live off of their deep down passions, not society constructed ones.
So my question is: why do we listen to advertisements? Instead of striving for world peace why do we work to buy a new car?
