Seeking Out the Missing Intimate Moments of Our Lives…

… through the products promising to take us there

Advertisers know that children strive for their parents’ unconditional love, but all-too-often miss out on the love they crave. These advertisers also understand they can never give children what their hearts desire: A warm, welcoming family granting them a life filled with experiences of belonging.

Advertisers know that all they can do is offer children a few material things and a limited range of services. They know each and every one of these will be a poor, unsatisfactory substitute for the love children long for.

Knowing all this, advertisers then settle on a terrible, awful course of action.

They lie to all the small children of the world.

Regardless of the product these advertisers pitch, no matter what the advertisement is for, we, as children, are told this one special consumer good has a unique magical property. This one consumer good has the supernatural power to gift you and I what we long for most of all…

Advertisers show us a mom and her four year old daughter sitting idly together in an unremarkable kitchen. Mom prepares to open up a can or a box, perhaps a can of alphabet soup or a box filled with hamburger helper. The can or box’s opening miraculously transports us to an inviting dinning room setting where a sumptuous meal covers the entire table. As the camera pans out to show a wider view, we realize around this table sits all we’ve ever wanted. Here sit mom and dad, both relaxed, playfully laughing, enjoying their meal, and most importantly, listening to and cherishing us as children.

In another ad, advertisers begin with the image of a dad drowning in his sea of work. He notices his five year old son in the hallway,  holding a new frisbee that promises to fly farther than any of its predecessors. Dad can’t resist.  Without a moment’s hesitation, he brushes aside his papers, liberates himself from a world of documents and deadlines, and does what you and I always hoped our dads would do: He makes his child the most important thing in his universe. He steps out into the sunshine and plays frisbee, so completely enamored by his son he can’t help but laugh with joy.

Ads like these promised us —when we were still young enough to play in sandboxes — that their products would bring us home to our families. They would gift us the love we longed for from our mothers and fathers.

Advertisers didn’t stop here. They promised us more. Their products would also bring us genuine friendships. One ad opens with a gloomy child alone in his room. His parents, recognizing their son’s melancholy and isolation, come to the rescue with the latest toy in hand: Two miniature race cars and the molded plastic tracks on which they run. After briefly showing the boy immediately buzzing with excitement, the scene shifts and we see his once isolated existence supernaturally transformed into a joyful afternoon spent playing race cars with friends.

Over and over again, 40,000 times each year, advertisers assured our young minds that consumer goods were a mystical doorway to the missing intimate moments of our lives. These products would build a life for us, one at a time, a life far more relationally attractive than the one we were living.

No one arrived to explain to us the coercive, manipulative intent behind the advertisements targeting us. To the contrary, our parents had been the ones — needing to park us somewhere when they got busy with the many tasks of modern life — to plop us alone in front of television sets and tablets. It was just you and I and the advertisers we believed were credible and sincere.

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Gradually, through one ad after another, outside our parents’ awareness but right under their very noses, our emotional and social lives were quietly hijacked. As children, we were unconsciously buying into the consumerist mythology, the myth that we would one day repair relational rifts, return to the circle of acceptance, and enjoy a life of belonging, all through simple acts of consumption.

We were lured into believing a mythical system: Mundane commodities were actually secret portals to a world of loving connection. In this way, our very human desire for each other was hijacked and became irrevocably interwoven into a world of commodities.

Our young neurology and physiology were taken over.

Our young brains, shaped by evolutionary forces to light up at the prospect of relationship and belonging, were quite literally reshaped by advertisements. Changes took place in multiple regions of our minds, including those responsible for decision making, behavior control, memory, and judgment. These changes led us to experience the same longing for and excitement with new products we once reserved for moments of connection with each other.

Our young bodies, born to feel excitement at the promise of belonging, and to relax in the presence of it, were also reshaped. We now felt the increased heart rate and blood pressure signaling excitement each time we were promised the latest toy or the newest brand of breakfast cereal. And the releasing of muscle tension and corresponding sensations of relaxation it created were also experienced every time we were gifted something shiny and new.

The great tragedy is that, as each ad pushed us and cajoled us to carry on in the direction of consumption, as these ads one-by-one transformed our brains and bodies into seekers of stuff, we were being driven further and further away from the love and belonging we were promised. A wealth of research demonstrates what we’ve always known deep inside: The more we identify with the things we own, the less connected and more miserable we feel.

Sadly, even when we grew into older children, sometimes recognizing that our purchases were pulling us further away from one another, taking us to a lonely life filled mostly with possessions, we found ourselves hooked and unable to stop…

Even now as adults, we often continue what we began when we were young. Advertising continues on, the pusher on the street corner. It tells us how good we’ll feel if we give in, just this one more time, and purchase the latest product. Surely, this time, the product will take us home: We’ll experience a fun, relaxing evening with our family when we buy the newest backyard BBQ; we’ll be rewarded with the joys of a weekend meal together when we go out for a hamburger and a Happy Meal; we’ll satisfy our natural desire for a romantic relationship when we purchase the newest pair of jeans; we’ll discover a confidence endearing us to others when we apply this fragrant deodorant; and we’ll satisfy our longing for a healthy sexual relationship when we spray on this high-end perfume.

When we continue to seek out the missing intimate moments of our lives through products promising to take us there, when we seek out a more interpersonally attractive life through the fantasy factory of consumption, we end up only connecting ourselves to the world of things and not to the very real human contact we genuinely desire. These attempts do little more than take us away from the real work that can bring us back to belonging.

I’d value hearing from you: How do you think we can divest from the illusion of consumption as the road to greater belonging and happiness? Can we put this genie back in the bottle? (And stay tuned for more from me, sharing my thoughts on how we got here and how we can reconnect to our true purpose: each other.)