You're Not Happy

Seems like a bold and audacious statement, doesn't it? Who is he, to claim that I'm not happy?, you may think. In an attempt to justify this bold claim, I might take the easy way out and say: "well, I got you to click on the article, didn't I"... But that's too easy, let me try another explanation.

The reason why I make this bold claim is pretty simple; capitalism as we know it depends on you not being happy. That's why there's a multi-billion dollar industry to keep you dissatisfied, and it's called "advertising." Capitalism's compulsory dependence on eternal growth is based in its profit objective. And for the economy to keep on growing, more products need to be sold. That's why we don't produce things to last, but products that so often break down right after the warranty period expires. Capitalism needs you to always come back for more. Therefore the advertising industry is set up to make you feel unfulfilled and dissatisfied with what you currently have.

That's why I dare say what I said in the title; in a world where our lifes are predominantly shaped by capitalism, it's safe to assume that most of us are indeed not satisfied with what we currently have. There's always the lure of some new gadget, fashion, car or some other thing that's missing in our life. Capitalism makes the false promise that you'll be happy, if only you buy this or that product. This promise is false, because if you would truly be happy, you'd never come back when the next model arrives. Capitalism, my friends, is the mother of all false promises. In Volume 1 of Capital, Karl Marx wrote: "Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets," and thereby defined the most important driving force and the inner law of motion of the capitalist mode of production. What makes capitalism tick is not only making profits by exploiting workers, but also that they reinvest part of that profit in further production to stay ahead in the capitalist competition. Competition makes it so that they don't have a choice but to act in that way. "Accumulation for accumulation's sake, production for production's sake" is where we end up, as Marx accurately predicted.

We may not want to admit it or realize it, but we're easily influenced and manipulated by brilliant marketing strategies. When did a diamond ring become an expected facet of marriage proposal? Well, that idea was (literally) sold to us by an ad agency for DeBeers, a corporation that mines, sells, and manufactures diamonds, after the discovery of enormous diamond mines in the late 1800s. And since then, "diamonds are forever", the perfect gift to communicate everlasting love. Nike says "just do it!", and we do buy their sneakers by the millions. The message is always that you don't have enough, you need more, you need new, you need the latest to be truly happy. And that's why you're not happy now. And that unhappiness is killing the planet as well. Here's the intro of a 2020 Harvard Business Review article about the dissatisfaction being sold to us:

The University of Warwick's Andrew Oswald and his team compared survey data on the life satisfaction of more than 900,000 citizens of 27 European countries from 1980 to 2011 with data on annual advertising spending in those nations over the same period. The researchers found an inverse connection between the two. The higher a country's ad spend was in one year, the less satisfied its citizens were a year or two later. Their conclusion: Advertising makes us unhappy.
_{source: Harvard Business Review}

Life in modern capitalist societies is not about appreciating what you have but about being driven by what you could have, or what someone else already has, like the smiling happy people we see in every commercial. And the advertisements are everywhere. Even if you do away with your TV and put an ad-blocker in your browser, corporations have filled every major city with their billboard-ads. And even if you ignore them, there's peer-pressure by friends and family who point out how outdated your mobile phone is. Like the below linked video says, if you're unhappy in your old car, you'll be unhappy in a new car after the "novelty effect" wears of. For our own sake, and for the planet's sake, maybe it's time we rediscover that happiness is a side-effect of love and belonging, a feeling of being part of a society that gives a damn about the human beings it comprises of...

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