Amazon has released a series of advertisements in support of their new free shipping on furniture and “Augmented Reality” visualizer. These commercials feature men and women in sexual ecstasy over their contemplation of a purchase. While this is merely the latest in a long trend of products over-promising and under-delivering in the “radical life changes” arena, it does illustrate the vapid and appetite-saturated nature of our current state of consumerism.
No, a new coffee table will not augment your reality any more than a double quarter-pounder with cheese or a Netflix-binge session. The sinking realization just makes you more hungry to indulge in your appetite in the hopes that your next consumer interaction will scratch the itch: the agony to your ecstasy.
The stoic philosophers believed that consumerism and avarice were tools of the wealthy and unvirtuous elites to control the poor. Epicurus remarked, “A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to mobs or monarchs.” Likewise, another story finds Diogenes washing vegetables in a stream for his meal. Aristippus, another philosopher, remarked that if Epicurus ingratiated himself with the powerful, he’d have no need to clean his own food in the water. Epicurus remarked, “If you learned to wash vegetables, you’d have no need to ingratiate yourself with the powerful.”
Like so much in our contemporary lives, nothing is really “new.” In the 1999 Classic “Fight Club,” we see the main character engage in just this sort of furniture-obsession, complete with real-time augmented reality populating his apartment with his new purchases. Except rather than the sultry side of copulation, the character’s interest in consumer furniture purchases lies with the aftereffects. He describes his compulsive purchases as a “nesting instinct.” Tyler Durden, the initiator of the story, tells the main character, “the things you own end up owning you.”
Whether you heard it from Tyler Durden or Diogenes, take care that the things you possess don’t end up possessing you.
atomized consumerism = bugman identity!
music also contributed to this starting in the 60s: your identity was what music you liked.
& Rolling Stone mag told those “in the know” what music to like.
i have faith that people will eventually shed their false identity & seek what’s real.