Appeals to the Flesh

This is probably a repeat of a previous post. If you are one of our bloglines subscribers you may be seeing double, because I accidentally changed the timestamp to January a few hours ago when I hit publish. Sorry about that!

No, not that flesh. I've mentioned before that I sometimes view my shopping dollars as a kind of game (this helps if you're competitive). I'm playing a game with the world of business. The object of the game is to see who keeps most of my money- me or the store where I'm shopping. I do everything I legitimately can to get the most for my shopping dollars- that might include using coupons, shopping loss leaders, hunting up frugal recipes, buying in bulk, checking the price per ounce, and comparison shopping. That's only one way to get 'the most' out of my dollars, of course.

Sometimes I get the most of a dollar by 'blowing it' on an experience that means a lot to me- watching Narnia in the theater on the big screen, for instance. While I do own over 6,000 books, I don't usually spend more than a few dollars at most on them. But I spent 25.00 to own a hardback copy of Island Story years before it was available online as an e-text, and I have never regretted that. But that's a post of a different color. This one is about playing that game whereby retailers try to get more of my dollars, and I try to keep them so as to use them more effectively.

Advertising is part of that game. Advertising succeeds when it informs me about a product or benefit I wouldn't otherwise have known about, but from the advertisor's point of view, it also succeeds when it convinces me that I need things that I really don't need and might not even have known existed before I saw that ad. Advertisements of this sort succeed by persuading me to be malcontent- by convincing me that my clothes, my house, my car, and my appearance are not good enough and I must spend money to fix them. These are the appeals to the flesh referenced in the title of this post. Such ads try to coax and inflate our pride, our selfishness, our conceit, and if they succeed we are indeed in danger, because trying to improve our lives through the accessorization of ourselves is a yawning, bottomless pit. When once awakened our desire for stuff to improve our lives and make us more desirable, likable people is all as hungry as the sea, and can digest as much.

So squash it, squelch it, and refuse to allow others to make merchandise of you or your soul. You can also use this for educational purposes. Perhaps more on that later.