Thursday 5/2/24
Do you ever think about how many times a day you encounter someone trying to sell you something? I'm talking between the internet, TV, social media, people plugging a product or a service, the people you know, or just walking around in your life. It's more than ever. Considerably more than it was pre-internet.
How many times a day would you say? 500 times? 1000 times?
People are always trying to sell you something. How much of it is any good? What's the percentage? Low, right? But the problem is, there's so much being pushed at you, and at everyone, that the good stuff can get lost in that storm of product and goods and services and promises and the award-winning that, the highly-recommended this, with the shouting and the touting and the pushing and the repetition. The spamming right down your throat.
I see some of the same ads fifty times a day. I tell Google I don't want to see anything from that venue again or about that subject--which is always a form of selling, too--and Google is like, "We'll send it to you another 100 times anyway."
I type in something about, I don't know, the Seattle Mariners--one thing--and then I'm deluged with Seattle Mariners things. You'd think I'd just bought the team the way the internet then treats me.
Sometimes it feels like the internet knows what you're thinking, and it starts sending you stuff about what you're thinking about before you've typed anything.
Human life--humanity--is itself becoming an algorithm. And the things that are sold, too, are almost always so ridiculous. Valueless.
There's this one ad here that runs over and over again. Maybe it does elsewhere as well. I don't know. This guy comes on and starts talking about himself like I should know who he is. I have no idea who he is. People are just so...surface. Why would you interest me if you're all surface? But the way he speaks about himself it's like he believes you should think he's very important. You should know his history. The trajectory of his life and career, the kind of things he thinks, the kind of things he believes. He's stops just short of talking about himself in the third person.
After he finally get done stroking himself, he has this tip for your love life, and starts to go into how stupid it is to get roses for someone, because they get thrown away after a week. There's a vase of roses on the table next to him, and so he sends it flying to the floor.
It's very, "Fuck you, roses."
His solution? A single rose dipped in gold, that you give your lady love. He came up with this.
And I'm thinking, What a tacky fucking douchebag this guy is.
This is just trash. Who would you give that to and expect them to be like, "Wow, this is so wonderful, I'm going to perpetually display this metal rose you gave me."
And yet, what this guy is selling is no worse than most anything else I see people trying to sell me.
There's no let up from people trying to sell you shit, and by that I don't mean "stuff" but crap stuff.
It's taken over society. The selling of shit. To the point that it's like there's nothing else anymore. It's a shit plague and how would you even find something good when you can't see through the clouds of locusts?
A metal rose stick. "Here you go, baby. Where you gonna put it? Let's display it prominently."
People would come over and be like, "Melissa, what's that?" and she'd say, "It's the metal stick rose that David bought me." What then? The other person says, "That's beautiful, you're lucky"?
That'd be crazy.
I feel like the kind of adult who buys a metal stick rose is the kind of adult who also drinks Mountain Dew.
