Selling happiness? Not so fast…

Do you ever feel exhausted from the constant influx of advertising? Just how each of us is assaulted by strategies every time we pick up a device. You may even notice that the language I am using here could remind you of that strategy. This is the language people and companies use to try and get you to buy their goods and services. Basically, the goal is to convince you that you are missing something that will improve the quality of your life. That’s the formula. While I’m not necessarily saying that such advertising is ALL bad (services do help people, and so do products); I think it is important to cultivate an awareness of the mental/cognitive structures that this advertising capitalizes on.

Such advertising is dehumanizing because it pits yourself against yourself. It plays on and reinforces your greatest insecurities. It markets to you an ideal version of yourself. It shows you images of happiness so repetitively that you can’t help but question, what if? What if it’s correct? You might think, I can’t take the risk, I’ve got to try! Often depression is talked about as if it is some abnormality as opposed to “mental health.” Yet, we can be marketed products and services that tell us we are missing something tens or hundreds of times a day and we are expected to be “mentally healthy.” Now clinical depression has a lot of potential contributing factors, I’m not saying we can reduce it to this one thing. However, if we just think this through logically, what can we expect to happen to our sense of selves if we are constantly assaulted with the message that we are missing something? Think of a child or teen. What do we expect to happen to a child or teen’s self-esteem if they receive the message 10 times a day, over 365 days per year that they are missing something? I would say that is a conservative estimate as well.

Rather than try to sell you something in this context, I’d like to throw out some radical ideas that maybe you can experiment with inside yourself, reminding your children, or your grandchildren.

·       You are not missing anything

·       There is no “one” way that you are supposed to look

·       There is no ideal life, no matter who tells you there is

·       Hardships are unavoidable, and rather than trying to avoid them we can learn how to use them to grow and connect us to the hardships of all beings

·       Comparing ourselves to others hurts, even though we all do it. The truth is that we can learn how to do it less if we are taught. We all arrive in this universe with different circumstances that are not always comparable.

·       What we have in a material sense has nothing to do with feeling satisfied internally

·       Our greatest capacity as humans lies within our own self-knowledge

·       Happiness is not a commodity, it’s not something we can have or not have, something we can buy or sell. It is a way of relating to self and other.

·       True happiness transcends relating to other as other, instead sees other as self