“Happiness is a billboard on the side of the road that screams with reassurance that whatever you’re doing is OK.”
Don Draper, Mad Men
January social media concerns itself with what we should be doing to improve our lives. It’s a dumpster into which we can throw everything that’s made us unhappy for the last year/decade/lifetime and proclaim, this year will be different. This year will be more. It lasts a while until facts take over and drive our best laid plans to the bottom of the pile.
The messaging from every direction is geared primarily at making us do what brings the messenger the most benefit. Marketing in all of its iterations is proper care and feeding of the ego. When we’re in the throes of it, which is always, we can hardly see it, because it’s meant to be unnoticeable. That stealth quality is the rigour that keeps the ball moving forward and us with it. We eat what we’re fed, and because we’re in the throes of pernicious capitalism and, as Kirsten Powers so aptly calls it, the American productivity fetish, we can’t tell if it’s steak or poison. The doses are small, and the suffering occurs slowly over time, until there’s very little left of ourselves to bring us over some imaginary finish line.
Why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we voluntarily sacrifice our well being to fill someone else’s bucket?
Is it any wonder that this virulent system at some point created New Year’s resolutions that would get us back on track so we can slap ourselves together and do the whole thing again, giving our best selves to this malefic system for another three hundred sixty five days?
Somebody, please, make it all better.
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