Growing up in southern California with billboards on every main street, I was always curious of what it would be like to have that car, clothes, toys, skateboard brand, instead of being content with who I was. Once I entered university, money became an issue for me; I didn’t have any to spend on unnecessary items like I used to. I began living on the essentials, buying stuff because it was functional and cheaper not because of the brand, which in turn allowed me to rediscover myself and true passions and led to a self-discovery which couldn’t be possible with all the distractions from the world telling us how to live and spend.
I am influenced by the writing of several existential thinkers as well as that philosophy of who we are and why we do what we do as a society. Consumerism and materialism, I believe, are this era’s forces that affect our social lifestyles. We are still thinking about that existential question, what our lives mean, but with advertisements constantly embedded in our lives we unconsciously give up our true selves to the world of the material. This especially effects the youth who have grown out of their adolescents and have begun searching for their true identity. We often spend too much on clothes, toys, gadgets, and other materialistic things thinking it will give us the satisfactions we desire, but it instead only forms a façade of our true selves. Corporations spend countless amounts of money in advertisement to persuade consumers to buy their product, showing us what we need to be happy, popular, beautiful, or successful. We buy certain brands to live a certain way.
