luctor et emergo

“Give me a days worth of honest work/ and a roof that never leaks / I’ll be satisfied.”

Walked to school today listening to Midlake’s album The Trials of Van Occupanther. The album seems straight out of Rousseau’s The Social Contract, or maybe even On Walden Pond. All the lyrics seem to focus on this desire for validity, to do something of benefit and value to oneself and others that older generations have had.

I’ve begun to think about what an excess of media has done to us culturally and in terms of identification and productivity. Lately my romance has been with entertaining thoughts of doing an internship at a winery somewhere in the Rhone Valley in France. I have little happy ideas about learning French, doing hard work and becoming more appreciative about wine. This is my idea of growing a little as a person into something better.

Upon telling this to someone they responded, “Oh, you must watch Sideways a lot…” and I was struck by the fact that they made that association. I saw Sideways in the theaters a while back and occasionally had recalled that it was a good movie and if I was hard up for good movies and feeling like a non-formulaic romantic comedy I might watch it again but the idea to watch it over and over again never occured. I enjoy wine, though the idea to associate this with watching Sideways, a movie that involves wine, never came to me. In theory though, and in this other persons mind, I could be a person who loves the aforementioned film and watches it whenever the chance arises. I could associate myself with this movie, list it on Facebook as one of my favorites, go to great lengths talking about it, show it to all the girls I dated, etc.

But what would I be doing? I’d be associating myself with an image, a quality that another object possesses while not possessing that quality myself. I could be someone who likes a movie because I like to be seen as someone who likes the things portrayed in that movie and in the end spend more effort on maintaining an image versus finding a substance. A lot of our youth culture is based around this now, so much time is spent worrying about preference and presentation. It’s a phenomenon of ad-culture. Band t-shirts, Red Sox caps, spinning rims, profile pictures, all of these are advertisements designed to convey information about a person that may not necessarily be true. I’ve known plenty of people that have lived in absolute squalor in order to afford a big car to impress women and give off the impression of great wealth to the outside world.

And so we lose the substance, grasping for the shadow. I get so bewildered at times looking for things which have value because in this culture everything is advertised as having this value. This is a byproduct of a consumer society that has been allowed to develop without regulation. There are so many things to do and watch and take up time with. This society encourages imbalance. Obesity is encourages because one will consume more food. Envy is pandered too because it will cause us to seek to emulate the rich by purchasing more expensive products. Ad-culture sells t-shirts. Guitar Hero lets you pretend at art. If I wanted to I could spend the rest of my life watching movies that represent things that I like.