Sunday 19 April 2015

Modern times

As I sit here scrabbling around trying to come up with a new plot, or at least follow where this one is taking me, with crap TV on in the background, I suddenly despair at the psychology of modern advertising.
It seems like every product in the modern world has to be the most amazing experience of your life. There is no longer any margin for good, or cool or happy experience, it has to be amazing, whether it's a telephone, a drink, a hotel, a holiday or a crispbread. And yet, at the same time, it has to be the cheapest the world has ever come across. Except that it's called the 'best possible price' because 'cheap' has connotations of - cheapness.
Mostly our lives are more comfortable than medieval royalty, more comfortable even than the very rich of sixty years ago. We have abundant choice of cheap food, booze, holidays. Even if we cannot afford a new car, a fifteen-year-old car can be more reliable and certainly less prone to rust than a new car of thirty years ago.
So, with this abundance of the easy life, what do we hanker after? Our fellow humans in advertising know - what we want is bragging rights. We want to have obtained better for cheaper than our friends so that we can lord it over them. Pathetic, isn't it?

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