We live in an infantile culture. We do what we’re told, and advertising does all the telling. We do what they want. We adapt to their whims.
Take the minivan, for instance.
At one time, we were told by a desperate, bankrupt Chrysler Corporation that minivans were the best thing since sliced bread. Thus told, we bought them. They were the perfect car, the Swiss army knife of the highways.
Then, as advertising pushed us all to become more sporty and active and fantasy-prone and youthful, the minivan became cancer on the market. Only drudges, the hopelessly frugal, or the misguided bought minivans.
The SUV became the advertising’s substitute. It was, despite being essentially a raised version of Chevy Chase’s NATIONAL LAMPOON’S SUMMER VACATION pea green station wagon, hip. It was marketed as youthful, sporty, and just the thing to haul your virtue-signaling skis, kayaks, canoes, organic mulch, bicycles.
Ooo, aren’t you forever young, even though you’re pushing 70, have had both knees replaced twice, and are hoping for an artery stent for Christmas! Good for you! Society approves!
Vans had to go away, because they were too practical. Advertising can’t sell practicality. At least not for long. Witness Rambler, witness toilet paper.
Vans were parental. Parents and family are too grown-up. Advertising has been making a seismic shift to youth-based selling, even to the elderly. Nothing is more anti-youth, ironically, than growing up enough to impart wisdom to the young. And hauling them in comfort to their soccer games.
SUV’s are omnipotent, grandiose, high and mighty, gluttonous. They are a device for making fantasies. Maybe one day you’ll have to drive through a state forest in order to escape mutant radiation-spewing flying aliens from Venus. Or from Mexico.
Children and the youthful elderly live in this fantasy world. Ads sell fantasies because artificial, nonsensical meanings can be promulgated through them.
Kayak this! :
But this isn’t about SUV’s. I like SUV’s. I’ve owned them. I’ve driven across my back lawn with them.
This is about the infantilization of culture.
There is a vast and growing literature about this. We are purposely being led by our noses down a path of self-righteous bratty squallinghood by marketers, advertisers, and corporations.
Why? Because a perpetually young person is never complete, never satisfied, and never finished buying stuff that he or she thinks will finally, once and for all, put them at peace.
Therefore, we live in a state of stuck “youth”, unsatisfied until well beyond death. By design.
We’re not just talking about America here. Dr. Bengu Basbug, a Turk from Hamburg, Germany, went back to Turkey and studied infantilization in advertising there.
Her doctoral thesis is available as an (expensive) book called WHEN BRAND COMMUNICATION BECOMES CHILDISH, print-on-demand.
Yikes. Things are bad all over, as Cheech and Chong said.
There is no such thing as a happy 80 year old, who can’t get out of bed in the morning without moaning, after he or she has been told several thousand times a day from a multitude of sources that they should be mountain climbing, forking the compost pile, or touring with Jeff Lynne and ELO.
This is our life. All we can have is an awareness of what “they” are doing to us. And resist it with a martini and the stereo.
