I sometimes wonder what it says about our world that virtually everything has to be marketed or sold with at least a partial — if not complete — lie attached.
I can only surmise that it has become so thoroughly ingrained in society that everything has to be a sales pitch that it is no longer enough to simply show what you have available and offer up an honest description of it.
The thing that seems sad is the fact that numbers that could be simply used to describe something are instead being used to mislead.
Often the lies are not direct... they stand on a technicality.
The banner at the grocery store might say you can "make this delicious family dinner for just $20!"
While that might be technically true it is not functionally and effectively true because you can't actually buy "two tablespoons of heavy cream and a quarter stick of butter" but the price used to arrive at the $20 figure is only counting the portion of the ingredients that you're going to use.
"Garnish with a sprinkling of fresh parsley" is a nice idea and adds 10 cents to the price but you can't buy just two sprigs of parsley, you have to buy an entire bunch for $1.29.
The whole thing is a deceptive practice that isn't actually lying directly, just indirectly.
The preceding is just a simplified example of so many things we see in life. They look good on paper but the version described on paper doesn't actually exist in reality.
Sometimes it's a bit like buying airplane tickets. You might see a banner headline on a website that says "fly to London for $299,round trip" and while that could be entirely true the moment you dig into it even slightly, you'll discover that there are only two tickets available at that price, and pretty much everything else is going to cost you $700.
Of course, those doing the advertising can point to the absolute truth of their statement because indeed there were a couple of tickets available at the lower price, just like the grocery store recipe was possible provided you had all the ingredients available anyway. But that's typically not how life works!
It leaves me wondering whether we simply wouldn't be interested in buying anything if it were actually advertised honestly. Have we become that jaded that simply saying "here's the product, these are the features and this is what it costs" would no longer have enough appeal to make a sale?
I can't help but feel that I'm missing the point somewhere, and that perhaps a deeper problem at hand here is that we are so oriented towards everything involving sales pitches — rather than simply being alive — in our world that authenticity gets completely drowned out.
Meanwhile, it feels like I'm surrounded by carnival barkers no matter where I turn!
Feel free to leave a comment — this IS "social" media, after all!
As always, a 10% 
