Selling Anxiety

"Advertising has always sold anxiety, and it certainly sells anxiety to the young. It's always telling them that they are not thin enough, they're not pretty enough, they don't have the right friends, or they have no friends, they're creeps, or they're losers--unless they're cool. But I don't think anybody, deep down, really feels cool enough--ever. That's the nature of advertising, to keep you hungering for more of the stuff that's supposed to finally put you there, but never does."

--Mark Crispin Miller,
from The Merchants of Cool

If the day ever comes in which each of us looks in the mirror and smiles, delighted with the image we see, advertising companies would be out of business. Paranoia is an advertiser's stock-in-trade. At the root of all successful ad campaigns lies the notion that just a little bit more of this or that will make us more attractive, better liked, or more popular.

As consumers -- members of a consumer culture -- we have never been more free to create and re-create ourselves. We can consciously pick our lifestyle by choosing a vision of life and then purchasing the goods, services, and images to realize that vision. We buy and sell information, purchase personal styles through fashion, pay for educational and social enrichment.

But are there problems with the assumption that creating a life for oneself amounts to a series of purchases, as if this were the sum total of our being? Has the media so ingrained in us an identity as a "consumer" that we have no meaningful existence apart from the economic exchanges in which we partake? We like to think of ourselves as rational individuals, fully aware of the purchasing choices we make. But are we as rational about those choices as we like to think we are, or are we being driven by desires of which we are hardly aware, seeking satisfaction in a system that depends on our never being satisfied?