Coming Full Circle

In my very first campus blog of the semester, on 30th August 2005, I made the following observation:

Does owning all of this stuff make us happier? Does it improve our quality of life? This is definitely debatable. It also causes me to reflect on what I have helped engender through being a paid shill for the Marketing profession. I hope there isn't a special place in Hell for the Marketers.

It would do us all well to consider exactly why we buy everything, and whether we really need it. Ignore the guilt trips people may lay on you for being anti-consumeristic. There's no mandate to be Material Girls and Boys.

I like what Bob Dylan had to say about this. In a 1991 interview with Rolling Stone magazine that marked his 50th birthday, the interviewer asked him if he was happy. After a long pause, Dylan replied in characteristic fashion:

"You know," he said, "these are yuppie words, happiness and unhappiness. It's not happiness or unhappiness, it's either blessed or unblessed. "

Those are words we would all do well to store in our conscience.

As we draw the semester to a close, I'd like to revisit those words. We've covered a lot of ground in all of my classes. As I said at the beginning, this would be a journey. And I'm not so much the tour guide as much as I am Fellow Participant.

It's just that I get to be the Fellow Participant over and over again. I think it's called a career or something.

The reason I bring all this up again is that I think all of us who claim to have taken any Marketing class need to reconsider what this profession is all about. It affects us all, our society, our culture. Whether or not you make a career in Marketing is irrelevant. But whether or not you make your mark in the world is everything.

I have come back to the well of doubt many times in my life. I have drawn many a bucket of questions that must be answered and dealt with. They cannot be avoided. And worse yet, there are questions whose answer changes over time. We live in a time where there are few absolutes. Truth, in many regards, has become a relative concept.

And so I wrestle still with the ideas of buying oneself out of depression, spending with reckless abandon (especially between Thanksgiving and Christmas), wondering whether the guy with the most toys wins, and debating whether Marketers will indeed occupy a special place near the furnaces of Hell.

Is it even possible to live a simpler life? Have the Amish really got it all figured out? Or are we all swept up in the endless rhythm of consumption with no hope of escaping?

It all becomes pathetically clear each time I trek to the dumpster at the end of our rural road. Where does all this stuff come from? I don't remember buying all these things.

And then I take a long look at my closet. What was I thinking when I bought that shirt? Or those pants? And what about my wife with all those shoes? Good grief, we could clothe a third world village just from our his-and-hers closets.

But then the angel in my head takes a break, allowing the demon voice to take over. "You bought those things because they made you feel better about yourself. You were stressed out and needed an escape valve. Who are you to question a person's right to buy things? Who are you to debate right and wrong when a purchase does no harm to anyone or anything?"

It's all very confusing, and quite frankly it consumes a lot of mental energy. But so does shopping. Why, I have spent hours shopping online and in stores to buy Christmas gifts for my wife, ones I hope she loves. Being a shopper is hard work.

But why do I buy her things with the masked hope that she will somehow be amazed with my exquisite tastes, when all she really wants is to just have me around more? For that matter, why do my wife and I buy stuff for the kids with the idea that they actually need these things, when what they really want (and need) is for us to just be there?

Yes, it's tough, and the questions swirling in my head for the 87th time still beg to be answered. But like Bob Dylan, I know deep inside that this is not at all about happiness. Happiness is fleeting, it is ephemeral. It's just a temporary boost to the system, a Prozac moment.

No, it's all about being blessed. And blessed I truly am. No amount of buying can increase the amount of blessedness. There is absolutely zero correlation between shopping and being blessed. And the positive correlation between shopping and happiness are spurious at best and definitely not indicative of a causaal relationship.

While I will remain a Marketer the rest of my days, I do so with great caution and respect for the people I impact. It is important to view the world through a wide-angle lens. In so doing you can gain proper perspective of your life choices and the causes you advocate. Marketing certainly has a place in our society, and we Marketing professionals (I use that term loosely) play a vital role in delivering the wants and needs of our population. It would be an entirely different world without us.

But we must see how this all comes together, how there are both good and bad dimensions of the activity, implications that can boggle the mind.

We all came together a little over three months ago from a multitude of paths, but we all wound up on the same track for a while. And now that our journey draws to a close, our paths will separate. Go forward and be good. Do good. Give good.

Thanks for joining me.

Dr "Back Where We Started" Gerlich