I was thinking the other day about how easy it is to get sucked in by the marketing that we see thrown at us. As far as I'm concerned, the typical "American Middle Class Lifestyle" is built on top of a mountain of waste and cheap junk. I don't really watch network tv (Netflix is basically all you "need"), and I don't have cable. I try not to allow the marketing machine to have a lot of access to my brain, because a lot of people who are smarter than me have bet a lot of money that I'll buy their junk if they show it to me enough times. If you don't think commercials and marketing have an effect on you, you're fooling yourself.
There is one silly consumerist thing that I still love though: "The Price is Right." I know it's basically just a thinly veiled ad for a bunch of companies. And I know that winning is mostly luck and not skill. I know that the prizes are mostly ridiculous and wasteful. I know that people probably pay obscene taxes on anything they win, so it's not even that great anyway. But regardless of all that, I totally love the show. Score a point for the evil consumerist marketing machine.
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