Focus

This piece will be about focus. As I described in an earlier post, I have been finding it difficult to keep concentrated when it comes to my work at the university. There seems to be too many distractions. Now it is perfectly normal to not take a step back and ask whether or not I am just plain lazy. Perhaps that might be the sole case. But perhaps other things might be a factor as well. I will try to interpret and relate this situation to a broader social perspective.

You see in the current consumer culture, host bodies of the consumer choke points (the vast majority of companies) go out of their way to ensure that their products occupy your daily life for as long periods as possible. The big ones try to optimise the amount of time per day you spend thinking about their products, because association is everything in a culture based on impulsive shopping and decision making.

In a former post I mentioned how the most important revolution that needs to occur is the one within your mind. That is because of this endless stream of impressions you are receiving from these sources that try their best to get your attention and as much of it as possible. It is because your identity is shaped to be contingent upon these stimuli you have learned to associate with your well-being. Be it having a soda with your meal, an ice cream on a hot summer day, saving up for that car you think would look cool or feel great. All of these things have made their entry into your world view at one point or another. They are not novel ideas or wants. A lot of them are carefully manufactured and shaped to make you behave in a certain way.

Think about this: The smartest people working in advertising are the ones that achieve not only you as a consumer, but you as a branded consumer. Suddenly you are sporting a product with a gigantic logo in the side, and you are providing a non-stop commercial for the company that owns the product brand. Additionally you are providing this service free of charge. Simply because it has been flooded into the media, the anti-social culture shaper of the west, that it is preferable for things to be this way.

Why?

Entertain this thought for a while. Ponder why it is preferable for a company to have consumers feeling that doing their job of marketing for them should earn you no reduction in the product price, no monthly salary for your work, and it certainly should be associated with no deliberate lowering of your personal integrity at all.

The answer should be simply. It turns you into a money-maker for the company even after you have done your final purchase with them. For you are now showing all your peers that this product is pre-approved by you. This enters into the debate yet another concept: Pre-approval. This is very important, because socially our culture forces us into a social hierarchy, and as such, the people that are below you are thought to be impressed by you and your actions. Your actions include your purchases, and you show off your purchases by using them in your everyday life.

You may recall a couple of years back when the hot topic was Neil Strauss, the author of the book The Game. In this book Neil theorised that women are like clock work and the discipline of picking up women should therefore be a trainable one. Now to my understanding his theories are by no means scientific, but they do have one very valuable point that I would like to emphasize to prove my own theory of consumption patterns.

Much like when trying to attract the right partner, we exhibit a lot of the same patterns when trying to make the right purchase or show off the correct social attitude. This is why pre-approval is everything today. There are so many things to buy and so many potential partners to chase, that we rely on some sort of highly integrable way of gauging whether a product or partner is right for us.

An associate of Neil Strauss said that an effective way to create attraction about your own person as a male is to team up with a female friend, or even better with two female friends, when going out, and then walking through the place you end up arm in arm with these women. Obviously it has to look as though you are simply pre-approved, not taken, by these women. It forms the illusion that you are independent of everyone else in that place, because you are already sorted out with what you need. You become an object of attraction because you exhibit the act of being attractive. It is a self-perpetuating circle.

So this is why the people that you look up to have the power over pre-approval for you. This is why James Bond sells cars. This is why Sarah Michelle Gellar sells shoes. This is why Santa Claus sells Coca Cola.

Now the interesting part is that this is perfectly honest business for most companies. It is respectable and people enjoy being a part of it. Consumer culture has now assumed such a stand-point in the west that we are what we buy. Because it displays who we are trying to associate with that is higher than ourselves in the social hierarchy.

Hence the revolution that needs to occur first is the one within your mind. You need to be liberated of what the hierarchy is being skewed to sell to you. You need to be able to make your own decisions about what to relate to and be relevant to.

Start out with shutting off your television.