Wednesday 9 June 2004

Pic of the day: Friendly serpent-spawn from City of Heroes.

Evil advertising revisited

The first advertiser was the serpent in Paradise.

Scientific American doesn't mention this, of course, in their article The Tyranny of Choice in April 2004. (I think it is safe to say that this is not an April joke, though.) They barely mention advertising at all, but it is certainly implied. What they find is that people vary along a scale from "maximizers" who always want to make the best choice to "satisficers" who are always satisfied with good enough. The maximizers love to have a choice, but get unhappy if they cannot know for sure that they made the best choice. Since there are so many choices, and so few things live up to expectations, the maximizers are chronically depressed. This is a general trend in America and the western world: Despite ever more choice, more and more people are unhappy.

***

I am an extreme "satisficer" myself, and a huge part of this is my disdain for advertising. More exactly, emotional advertising. Fact sheets I can readily live with. But as soon as you need to show pictures of happy people with your product, you have basically admitted in public that your product does not stand on its own merit. The more emotional and irrelevant your advertising, the more inferior the product must be. Healthy people don't walk with crutches, and they definitely don't need a motorized wheelchair. And TV ads are the wheelchairs of commerce: They may help a product advance, but they also automatically expose it as being totally lame.

This seems obvious to me, as hard to ignore as a lamppost in broad daylight. But I don't know whether this is because of the intelligence I was born with, or wisdom I have received from the Lord. It seems to me that only the severely retarded would believe that you become pretty and popular by chewing gum and drinking soft drinks. But my own experience (and others') shows that we can all become temporarily retarded when our desires reach the size of needs. And they will, if allowed to grow. So much of advertising is groundwork suited to make people more needy, greedy and prone to desire and lust. Once there, their critical faculties fall eerily silent.

I am kinda sorry to offend those of my readers who work in advertising, but ... Advertising was offensive first. By creating high expectations, you set up people for a fall with following unhappiness and even outright depression. Please don't do that.

***

The article in itself is quite interesting. It details something I have mentioned repeatedly in these pages: Despite an ever rising standard of living, people stopped growing more happy years ago. According to this scientist, they are actually growing more and more unhappy, and depression is becoming widespread. He and his colleagues devised a questionnaire that classified people along the axis of striving for perfection in their choices. Those who wanted to get only the best were called "maximizers", and those who didn't much care were called "satisficers". Those are people like me who say, as long as it's good enough I don't worry about it. It's just not worth it.

(How to know easily that you're a maximizer: If you keep changing channels on your television or radio. Fear! Of course, if you're an extreme the other way, you may not have a TV and not turn on your radio unless there's something special coming up...)

What the project found out was that maximizers were a lot more prone to depression and generally had a lousy quality of life, despite their hard work to always do the right thing. They expected to enjoy the fruit of their work, but they didn't. There were so many alternatives that were subtly different, they could never know for sure that they had made the right choice. And when the joy of a new acquisition faded – as it always does, this is a function of how the human brain works – the glory of the competing choices did not fade, and they became convinced that they had made the wrong choice. Furthermore, they considered this a personal failure and felt bad about not just what they had done, but their very selves.

There was no mention of the negative effects of being a satisficer. Obviously if this was pure good for body and soul, the opposite trait would have been bred out of the human race for the most part. But the opposite is nearly true: Maximizing is widespread and easy, while satisficing is rare and hard, at least in our culture. Probably everywhere.

This is where the article entirely avoided the fact that we are constantly brainwashed into devoting our time to shopping for the ideal product. And, increasingly, the ideal lover as well. It may be that evolution on an individual level might favor the people with a relaxed attitude. But as a society, the maximizers are the hamsters on the wheel that drives capitalism. It is these people who are never satisfied who try, try, try again and keep buying and working overtime and buying more, always chasing happiness but never reaching it. Thanks to them, we all have more of everything. And the more choices we have, the more desperate they become. In societies where quiet contemplation is praised as a virtue, capitalism has taken more time to take hold. And when it finally does, it does so by overcoming those traditional virtues.

I don't think we would like to live in poverty, but it seems people also have a tough time with wealth. I agree with the wise man quoted in Solomon's proverbs: "Give me neither poverty nor riches." Luckily for me, I am right there right now. As far as my relations to the world of commerce is concerned, I'm happy indeed. I may still have some aspects of my life to work on, but overall my days are pretty good. And that's no thanks to you, mind-poisoning advertisers! Pray to whatever deity you may have heard rumor of, that your eyes will never be opened so you can see the suffering you have caused.