On buying hype and happiness

"Have you heard of merino wool?"


"Yeah, it's the new stuff right? Warm and light, just like what cashmere and fleece were supposed to be last year and the year before that."


"Yeah, I was looking at this thing to get my girlfriend -"


"That looks neat. But way to expensive... I was never a really into stuff that were seasonally marketed. It feels too much like I'm paying mostly for the marketing value. Look how cheap fleeces are now - and maybe how cheap it even feels!

"I'm absolutely okay with good marketing. It makes it sexy, makes you feel sexy. But the new hot sweater material coming out every season, and seeing the pile of sweaters that lie around after the years - it just left me to prefer whatever is cheap and warm, or whatever you can prove to me scientifically that it is warm."


"Sure, but you can't judge other people's decision to buy that happiness. That marketed value of how sexy and warm it is, no matter how much of it is just a hype, and none of it in science. You're not just buying the material product, but also the psychological reward. You can't blame people for 'buying into marketing', whether or not they know what it is. They buy the manufactured happiness, and marketers create them.

"And that's how the economy works. I came to think it that way more once I started working. I used to bake and cook. More of the artisanal craft. Then now that I'm working, I earning money, but losing time. I find myself to much rather be spending that money for my happiness, however materially efficient or scientifically provable it is. And I have no problem with the marketers, producers, sales staff and everyone else in the supply chain making profit."



'You're right that I shouldn't judge people of their choice. Definitely not if they can afford it - Good for them that they can. The market's status quo works - for the buyers and sellers of the hype. It's a fair deal, and I think your argument of relativism stands. Who am I to judge their seemingly incorrect choice? The standards of fashion and practicality can all just be subjective.

'Regardless, I think I'd much prefer a more functionalist and pragmatic market. Placing premium on luxury that is not based in technology or aesthetics - that creates a false value and materialistic excess. Even distracting misguidance to us all. If merino wool isn't any warmer nor prettier, should we really be pumping out that many sweaters and making more people buy them? Is that the best progress in consumer-driven capitalism can achieve? Buyers and sellers are both encouraging each other to create more excess that the environment, the equality in society, or the development of consciousness does not need. At that scale and scope of view, the purchase is no longer justified and is again under criticism.

'I think - I want to wish and push for a world, as a whole, that does not simply direct itself to solely consumptive happiness. Where, maybe not everyone but at least more people, put value on producing and purchasing innovation in technology, aesthetics, or equality. A more efficient market with more scientifically informed, artistically inspired, and morally motivated buyers and sellers.

Wouldn't that kind of a world make us want something more than the empty marketed hype to be happy?'


Mothagesso.

Sleepless night

Sleepless nights. For no reason I know of. Seeking solutions to problems and questions I do not know of. No answers, just failed solutions. Sleepless nights. Alcoholic beverages, nicotine smogs, and melatonin pills are known to deter restful sleep. Meditative breathing, working out, and warm milk, none of them are proving to help. Restless nights. My mind bounces faster than my heart, to no avail. In nightly silence like these I break open the regrets I forgot about. Fragments of feelings I've visited before. The most meaningless repetition must be this. Or are these pieces to the questions I've yet to visit? Helpless nights. Insomniac solitude leaves me nowhere else but here. In between the inexplicable evenings and ignorant mornings, aimless and fruitless, in stillness of tonight.


Mothagesso.

"If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it."


Mothagesso.

2015

No other year has made me feel older.

I talk about feeling old to my old friends a lot more. Most of them feel the same. Not surprising since my old soul probably has kept other old souls close as it got older. I also feel like meeting and talking to friends from old times whom I haven't seen in a while. And then talk to them also about feeling older. How I can't rage like I used to. Then rage again the next day like I used to. How I don't feel like going downtown like I used to, just be in the center of the crowd. How I felt invincibly confident like I used to. Then intensely sad and then again flippantly flip to being okay.

Last year was a transitional period. I only knew how to party like I did and spend the weekends as I had. So I didn't know what to do on Friday nights, whether I was outside weary of the same-old or was inside antsy in my household. This weekend, I had a dinner with my mom on Friday and went to bed at 10. On Saturday, I decided to watch the soccer game with my friend at home instead of going out somewhere. My mother said we're getting old. With a gentle tone of approval as if to welcome us to the club.

It's not just the worn out confessions of a reckless kid finally growing out of whatever he was into. Whatever he was into that he doesn't remember because of his recklessness then. I knew for a while that I wasn't young anymore, like, young-grasshopper young. That ended when we graduated from high school. Ended around when I hit nineteen. But now I know I'm not young anymore as in, I'm not that twenty or twenty-three year-old young guy, legally and physically an adult but pretty much just a kid who was allowed all the sweets and parties he ever wanted.

I'm just a full-time adult now. Twenty four was getting used to that fact. Twenty five is just screaming old. It's divisible by five, you know. A bigger divisor than the typical two or three or four, and somehow that makes that age feel much older. Nothing from now on will feel like it's early in the game. It's the fact that most up-and-coming celebrities are sixteen, like they used to be when I was young, but now they're born in 1999. That professional soccer player on the national team I was cheering for, he was born in 1992, a year before me. I'm older than more people on TV than I used to be. It's also the fact that the '90s is decade and a half ago, which just doesn't feel right.

Some parts of becoming older are less about what I do. Or about odd numbers. I don't write as much of anything more, or rather, don't feel the dire urge to. I used to. When I was really young, I remember trying to remember all the earth-shattering philosophies I was coming up with during church mass. I'd come back and type out some couplet of faux wisdom that no one could understand. Or maybe someone could, I just don't remember any of them. When I was older, I wanted to write something more coherent and profound. Which was harder to do, all the more so because I thought there were other things more important to do first. More important, as they have become.

"Keep young". That's the phrase I wanted to inscribe on my first iPod. In Latin, too, given my naïve love for mature-sounding classical language. "Servo Iuvenis" is what Google translated it into. I remember that. I came up with that phrase while talking to a friend about the aggravating uncertainties I felt about all the facts and thoughts out in the world. And about the annoying petrification of opinions and values I saw in old people. Never be like that, always be open to new ideas, changing opinions, experiencing new things, doing reckless things.

I never had a saying, role-model, symbol, token, or anything that was so meaningful to me and so integral to my existence or identity. I don't think I do still. I still don't have anything I'd tattoo on myself. Five or so years later though, that's one of the things I remember. Now as a reminder, rather than a pledge. For the first time testing itself. And for the first time, showing and suggesting a little more than it has before. Perhaps I'm just still just in transition. Coping and resisting. But not towards becoming more mature, but just old. Older.

Mothagesso.