My recently acquired partner expressed a concern, recently. Should we be together for the long-term, would I respond to the inevitable loss of passion in a relationship by seeking stimulation of the carnal variety elsewhere.
In other words, would I ever cheat on her?
I conceded that I probably would. After all, I was basically just a man, naturally weak and scummy and essentially lacking in control over any of my bodily functions. I also reminded her of the old adage about how a man was basically as faithful as his options.
She responded with a few choice swear words, wrapped in an impressive range of menacing snarls, punctuated with a staccato of graphic and very violent threats. Rattled, I quickly assured her I was kidding. I also attempted to defuse the tension by coming up with a joke solution to provide her with proof of my fidelity: every two hours, I would send her a text message informing her of the time, the temperature and my status: faithful or unfaithful.
To prove it was really me (and not some clever computer program that sends text messages every two hours), I would also solve a Sudoku puzzle of her choosing and send back the answers.
She wasn’t amused.
Let’s put aside for one second the obvious observation that this is precisely the kind of joke she would have laughed at, before we got married, and concentrate on another question that occurred to me:
Does the media age that we live in encourage us to stray from the things that we have and look longingly at the things that we don’t? In other words, does advertising make us more likely to cheat on our partners?
Think of the central premise of advertising. Often, it’s some variation of:
‘We have something better for you.
But do they? To create a context for this proposition, ads have to start by casting doubt in your mind about the satisfaction you derive from the product or service you already have. In the context of our example, it’s basically saying: ‘Listen, friend, your wife isn’t the hottest thing around. We know women who are way hotter. and you have a choice’
Advertising is, simplistically enough, all about choice. It’s there to highlight said choice and promote the merits of one over another. In the media age, choice has become so ubiquitous and prevalent, that when confronted with a situation where there is little choice (or *shudder*, none), we react with howls of petulant and indignant frustration, and exhibit withdrawal symptoms, like the choice addicts that we are.
Not only is choice at the heart of our existence, change is as well. We’ve become remarkably well equipped for it, when historically we’ve always feared it: we now travel halfway across the world in a matter of hours, for work or romance or an education; we switch jobs more frequently than our grandparents switched socks. We change our wardrobe, our minds, our friends, our outlooks, our addresses and our gender, without batting an eyelid. Even that eyelid, we changed with reconstructive surgery.
Change is good, baby.
Another thing that needs to happen for advertising to work, is convince you of your worthiness to change. The ad world effectively sums up this strategy in four little words:
“Because you deserve it .
The implication is you owe it to yourself to explore your options. To secure the best possible deal for yourself. And if you don’t, you’re selling yourself short. Why settle? You’re special and you can have better than what you have now, and more of it.
Well, we can’t all be special.
Of course, it’s simplistic, this flawed analysis of mine. Of course, there’s more to what makes us cheat than that; such as natural selection, social pressure, religious influences and the alleged conscience that humans are supposed to possess. But whereas people have a choice in whether they cheat or not, whether they always crave what they don’t have or value what they don’t possess, advertising has no such choice.
Advertising is doomed to reinvent itself, in order to stay noticed. It is blighted with a shallow, superficial and ultimately disposable nature. It cannot survive if it appeals to people’s higher senses, only if it engages their baser ones. It has no choice but to be the way that it is.
Advertising has no choice. Oh, the delicious irony!
You, on the other hand, always have a choice. You can accept that you’re not as special as the advertising says you are. That there’s value in change, but there’s also a lot of value in roots. That instead of looking out for number one, one hundred percent of the time, you can look out for numbers two through six billion, some of the time. Most importantly, you can remind yourself that even though advertising and TV and the movies are doing their best to convince you that you live in a culture of choice, what they’re really encouraging is a culture of comparison. And how toxic is that?
Next time, I’ll talk about the scoring system for this culture of comparison.
Mohammed Nassar was kidnapped at birth and forced to work in advertising, in Cairo, New York and London. Today, his main concern is that archaeologists will one day stumble upon his desk, debate the value of his profession and judge him.
