The Unfortunate Pervasiveness of Object Over Imagination

Marketers are, at best, exaggerators and, at worst, outright liars. Their purpose, generally speaking, is to persuade you into thinking you have a need that you likely don’t and then to convince you that this need can be filled by this thing or that thing which they happen to be selling.

The immense scale on which marketers operate has led to a very regrettable state in which our dreams and imaginations are tied to rampant, mindless, unsustainable consumerism. Instead of wrestling with the internal barriers which keep us from being the people we want to be or from doing the things we want to do, our present condition leads us to treat desirable human characteristics or necessary life experiences as commodities that can be bought and sold.

The Boy Who Wanted To Freelance

In the autumn of 2007, I wanted nothing more than to be a freelancer. I didn’t, however, have the slightest idea of how to be one. I was completely lost. Were I part of a reasonable society, I might have been inclined to interview working freelancers, build a website through which potential clients could contact me or start emailing local businesses who had websites I found to be lacking. Experience is, after all, the only true way you can ever know about how to do anything.

But instead of being a freelance web designer, my instinct was to purchase those things which I knew freelance web designers to have. I more than willingly went into debt: $500 for a Mac Mini, $600 for Photoshop, $30 for some Moleskine notebooks, $800 for a digital camera, $100 for a desk, $50 for a decent office chair, $15 for a copy of “How to be a Graphic Designer without Losing Your Soul” (which I never actually read.) With all of this in my possession, I was able to feel like a true designer.

The problem, of course, is that I wasn’t.

I looked like someone who could design a web site, but the truth was that I hadn’t bothered with anything even resembling web design since I was twelve years old. I only vaguely knew HTML (Year 2000 HTML, mind you) and had absolutely no idea what CSS was. I went into debt to be a well-equipped hack. For whatever reason, I had felt that having these material goods would somehow make my designs beautiful, my code clean, my clients plentiful and my wallet fat. Instead, I was now hopelessly in debt and still had to do the real work of learning to be a designer and a project manager and a programmer. Things that take time and brain power.

I could have saved myself a lot of money had I realized that doing the thing I want to do or being the person I want to be is just a matter of either choosing to do or choosing to be. The truth is that I already owned all that I needed for the process.

The Object And The Story

Recently I stumbled onto an article about American Girl, a subsidiary of Mattel that produces high-end historical dolls for young girls. A visit to one of their stores — American Girl Place, as they are called — provides you with the opportunity to purchase a doll that comes with a backstory in book form for around $95. Also available for equally ridiculous prices are a variety of outfits (for the dolls and also matching outfits for their human owners), a sampling of period-style furniture, a pet, hobbies and recreational pastimes, health care, hair care, the opportunity to have a picture taken with your doll and also the opportunity to have lunch with your doll or to take in a show. A single trip to the store could easily total $1000. The existence — let alone the success — of such a place speaks volumes about the unfortunate pervasiveness of marketing.

Our capacities for creativity peak in our youth when we are least susceptible to the opinions of others. Childhood playtimes are fueled by unadulterated imagination. As a boy, I’d mount my cheap Huffy bicycle and roll over an aluminum soda can, ensuring that the middle got completely smashed and the edges wrapped around the wheel. As I rode, the can would stall at the fork just under the seat and let out a vibrant roar that would grow louder the faster the pedals moved. At that moment, the bicycle became a motorcycle, the trees became monsters, the paths worn in the grass became roads and I became some sort of renegade-monster-slaying-force-to-be-reckoned-with.

And while my eight-year-old self was perfectly content with such a set up, marketers like those at American Girl would suggest that I’d have had more fun if my bicycle was actually shaped like a motorcycle and, instead of the can, it had a speaker which burst with the rumbling of an actual engine when pedaled. And what’s a renegade without a leather jacket and an eyepatch? And what would his adventure be without life-sized, plastic-molded, karate-chopping, eye-glowing, demon-shaped antagonists? And all of this for the low, low price of $349.95!

For me, marketers have been and always will be thieves. We all have this inborn capacity to imagine, free-of-charge, a world that isn’t and, for a time, to live within that world. We all have this capacity to be, free-of-charge, who we want to be and to do, free-of-charge, what we dream of doing. All three of these capacities are inborn. They are our stories. Marketers attempt to steal these stories and sell them back to us. Our dolls can’t have personalities without overpriced period-style furniture and matching outfits. Our bicycles can’t be motorcycles without expensive shells and a rumbling speaker. We can’t be designers without a Mac Mini and Photoshop.

We must realize that our stories are our own and that, while marketers may tell us otherwise, all of our dreams, desires and goals can be realized utilizing only our free-of-charge inborn capacities… if we so choose.

If we are to move away from these lives we are certain don’t fit us — and with this I mean to say, if we are to truly revolt against the status quo — we all must make it a priority to adopt a minimalist lifestyle. Minimalism is, as you probably know, a rejection of the superfluous. First, it means having only what we need and, second, it means that of the things we need we only buy those which we can’t get otherwise.

And, most importantly, we ought not buy anything that promises us that which only we can accomplish.

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