What Are You Selling?
This is an advertisement. This is a representation of what marketing companies use to inspire people to buy their products. The purpose is to make a person think, “Hmm that does look like a nice moment I’d like to experience. If I bought those items then maybe I can replicate it…” But what I find interesting is that people are no longer satisfied with having “the moment”. It’s not enough to simply want to experience the photo, they want to recreate the photo!
Let me explain. In this day of digital cameras, how often do we see people on our social media feeds posting pictures that look identical to this? It’s as if the moment didn’t happen unless you have a photo to prove it. We want our life to look like advertisements! But as any marketer will tell you, photos like this require very deliberate staging, so what I want to know is, what exactly are we selling?
For some, it may be an image. Perhaps we want people to think that we are living life to the fullest. “Just look, I have the photo to prove it!” For others, it may be that they just want to capture aesthetically pleasing photographs for artistic purposes, though I think that’s more of the minority. I think the real problem is that we’ve bought into the power of marketing to the degree that we think our life is not good enough unless it looks like a page out of a magazine. That somehow these still images reflect our quality of life. But do they really?
How often do we actually miss the opportunity to savor a special moment with a loved one because we had to drag the camera out? Why isn’t it enough to just be present? I’m all for preserving wonderful memories, but maybe we would make more of them if we stopped trying to force it for the sake of our need to prove we’re having them. Maybe we would actually enjoy life more if occasionally we would put down the camera and just live!
“The purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.” -Eleanor Roosevelt
