Imagine living in one of the most affluent countries in the world. You always have more than enough food to keep you alive and in good health. You have constant access to clean drinking water. Your bodily waste is transported efficiently from your home to a sewage treatment plant that you have never visited. Your home is always warm, well-lit and dry. You are gainfully employed and a system of rules and laws ensures that your employer cannot force you to work in dangerous or insanitary conditions. In every week, you have at least two days set aside for leisure and to manage your personal affairs. A number of additional full days can also be set aside for you to take holidays. If you have children, they are provided with an education and are not expected to work for a living before reaching adulthood. Most of your fellow citizens are essentially law-abiding so the streets of your home town are safer and cleaner than in the towns of most of the world's countries. A number of industries exist purely to provide people like you with things and activities to keep you amused - professional sport, publishing, television, movies, video games etc.
But you are dissatisfied. You are dissatisfied because every day you see images of people whose lives appear to be much more comfortable and interesting than yours. They have more money. They appear to have many friends and to be adored not only by those around them but by millions of strangers whom they have never met. They are better dressed than you, wearing more expensive and well-made clothes, which fit them better and which are combined to form more stylish outfits. They have more attractive facial features than yours - better bone structure, no blemishes, straighter and whiter teeth, better behaved hair. They seem to burst with almost excessively good health and move with graceful ease. They wear wristwatches that cost as much as you earn in a half a year. They drive cars that cost as much as you earn in several years. They live in homes that cost more than you will earn in your whole working life. They are routinely congratulated for even their smallest achievements. They constantly receive compliments. When they express opinions, their thoughts are listened to carefully and shared via newspapers and other media. When they consent to be interviewed, it is inconceivable that they should be asked any questions that might cause embarrassment. To ensure this does not happen, contractual arrangements are put in place and carefully enforced.
You press your nose up against these lives. These lives are played out on your TV screen. These lives are described, down to the most banal detail, in magazines that you can buy in the supermarket, at the petrol station or in the ticket hall of a railway station. There exists a subspecies of journalists, employed only to gush enthusiastically about the minutiae of these lives. All the time. Every day. Over and over.
They look down on your from billboards. They smoulder at you during the advert breaks. You would recognise their voices with your eyes closed. You see their faces more often than you see your own mother's face. You see them thousands of times a day. Millions of times a year. As you drive to work, voices on the radio are chattering excitedly about their lives. When you get to the office, colleagues stand around the water cooler discussing these people's exploits.
On the same day, you are asked two questions. You are able to answer the first question much more confidently than the second one.
- "Which of the Kardashian sisters is the eldest?"
- "Can you explain the difference between the terms 'Great Britain' and 'United Kingdom'?"
But then that stops working.
Even when it did work, the clothes, cosmetics and haircare products did not have quite the same effect on you as they seemed to have on the people on the billboards.
Back to TOP
0 comments:
Post a Comment