Thanks to reader anon who left a link to an article titled “Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed“, we can continue discussing an issue that interests me a lot, namely, a grievous ignorance of the general public of everything that concerns human psychology.
The article is in no way different from a multitude of similar pieces where all that an author has to sell is zero insight into anything whatsoever. The blueprint for these article is always the same: the author identifies an extremely trivial phenomenon, shows that s/he is completely baffled by it, and proceeds to roll out a very bizarre explanation that is based on badly digested self-help books and TV shows of the Dr. Phil type.
This is the big question that the article’s author find it so hard to answer:
One of the most surprising discoveries I made during my trip was that I spent much less per month traveling foreign counties (including countries more expensive than Canada) than I did as a regular working joe back home. I had much more free time, I was visiting some of the most beautiful places in the world, I was meeting new people left and right, I was calm and peaceful and otherwise having an unforgettable time, and somehow it cost me much less than my humble 9-5 lifestyle here in one of Canada’s least expensive cities.
Yes, hugely surprising. For people under the age of three. Because everybody older than that has already figured out that vacationing is easier than working and, hence, the psyche needs a lot less maintenance (called “compensatory mechanisms” by those who as old as 18) to vacation than to work.
In the documentary The Corporation, a marketing psychologist discussed one of the methods she used to increase sales. Her staff carried out a study on what effect the nagging of children had on their parents’ likelihood of buying a toy for them. They found out that 20% to 40% of the purchases of their toys would not have occurred if the child didn’t nag its parents. One in four visits to theme parks would not have taken place. They used these studies to market their products directly to children, encouraging them to nag their parents to buy.
We all know how much I love this impotent and immature narrative of parents as victims of their own small children. What is especially funny is that an author who dedicated the preceding paragraph to ranting against companies selling people useless junk immediately demonstrates the propensity to buy useless junk in the form of idiotic documentaries. Of course, it is easier to swallow the pablum dished out by such stupid film-makers than to make an effort and realize that the only language small children know is the one their parents taught them. If they nag, that only happens because their parents taught and encouraged this system of communication to the kids. If these parents suffer so much because of “having to buy the things they don’t want to buy” (which is, of course, a lie. They do exactly what they want to do), they can simply teach their children another way of communicating. By doing so, they would do us all a huge favor because I, for one, find it excruciating to have to deal with whining students who bring this annoying habit from home.
[To be continued. . .]
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