Today’s trend of self-love and self-development has invaded every corner of daily life, from your sleep to your job, from your bathroom to your family gatherings. The information on how to love the self is endless, techniques, gift bags, courses, retreats, etc. All these products market how to love ourselves. However, the constant linguistic reminder that street advertisements and algorithm-based product placement send us only leaves us feeling that we do not love ourselves enough, regardless of what we do. If we did, we would be successful and happy. But we aren’t; we need all these tools and techniques that some have not heard of before. Wee need to look at everything we are categorising our experience of the now, of the past, of the need, of the want, of our imperfect perfect bodies. However, the image of happiness and success we pursue does not differ from the idyllic images of the advertisements of earlier years of brute product pushing we have seen in the 00s and before. The market is you, and whatever you may feel you lack, it is ready to prefab and monetise it with your wallet, hard work, illusion, and past.
Where did we lose our self-love? Is self-love something we never had? How has humanity gone without “self-love” for thousands of years, and suddenly, we discover the lack and start craving it? I am not sure. I can keep asking these questions forever without ever finding an answer or a bit of solace from the trend, except when I am off to the wilderness. Out there, without mirrors, without billboards and signals, without indications of human existence, there is absolute silence.
. The realisation that the world we live in is relentlessly talking to us is shocking. Telling us what to do and how to do it might have a useful function, but when it starts to determine your life choices or, even worse, makes you feel bad about yourself, it is time to say “stop”. It is a toxic relationship red flag. It is not a choice we can make; street advertisement is unavoidable, and even if you think you are not paying attention, your senses are receiving and processing the information. Our eyes, ears, nose and skin recollect more information about the world than we consciously acknowledge. And marketing agents know this. They are not the evil doers, the marketeers; they are doing their job, selling you stuff. Like the story of the scorpion that bit the man helping him cross the river. It was in its nature. However, they both drown.