Stress Levels Abnormal
No, you do not get to sell me my ability to deal with life with your fucking porridge.
So, I’m sitting in a well-known coffee shop (whose marketing and legal departments I don’t wish to annoy by naming them directly) and “admiring”, as I so often don’t, the adverts selling you the stuff you’re already in here drinking or eating. I’m interested, in that way of mine that is actually more frustrated, annoyed and angry, in what looks like an entirely innocuous advert for a breakfast comestible. I don’t think you’re supposed to take its message to heart, let alone get as worked up about it as I have become, but it’s irritating me. It’s really, to quote a phrase, getting on my wick. Not because of what it’s attempting to sell. It’s the world-view it’s peddling that is grating on my nerves.
So, there’s another reason not to mention whose advert it is and exactly what it says.
But it’s an advert for porridge. Good old, simple old, porridge. Goldilocks’ favourite. Nom Nom. Now, I’m not an advertiser (having chosen not to sell all of my soul to Beelzebub; he got quite enough of it when I went to work in academia). Indeed, my habit of never watching commercial TV if I can help it and avoiding all websites that plaster adverts all over what you’ve actually bloody come there to read means that I am really no expert in their arcane practices. However, this particular advert’s assertion that the product in question (porridge — nom nom) can provoke paroxysms of delight on even the “toughest” of mornings really rubs me up the wrong way.
I’m sure the “likes of me” have long since lost our arguments that ads aren’t supposed to be selling us the way we live our lives alongside their wares. But the ever increasing normalisation of stress and “tough” lifestyles, as if there’s no alternative and nothing whatsoever wrong with rushing about like a fly with a bum of a certain colour, is something that we should challenge… Surely? If we, I don’t know, what to be a bit more humane to each other. If we perhaps want to reduce the expectation that we’re all on the verge of a collective heart attack before it gets really out of hand and we all basically become the famous Monty Python “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch. If that hasn’t already happened, of course.
As so many ads for cold remedies now proclaim, we’re all living this “tough” existence now. We’re all supposed to be up at the crack of dawn, never seeing daylight, juggling multiple jobs to make ends meet (on zero hours contracts, natch) and desperately staving off, actively ignoring even, any signs of our actual human frailties. Like the tiredness or, heaven help us, ill health that might conceivably just strike because of this frankly inhumane existence. If you do happen to get a sniffle, a croaky throat or even a bout of explosive diarrhoea (which surely is one thing that no-one needs to be taking into work with them — anyone remember the loos from Theme Hospital??), you’re now meant to swallow your pills as advertised by the smiley women (with the fake happy voices) on the telly. Like a good economic work unit. Yes, even if you have the galloping ****s. You’re meant to get on with your “tough” existence in as unquestioning a manner as you can muster. Wearing a fucking diaper, if necessary. Life, after all, is meant to be tough. We’re told that all the time. By the media, by our supposed political “leaders”, and now by adverts for breakfast comestibles…
If you just eat your porridge, you can cope with anything.
Or, as people I generally can’t stand say: suck it up, buttercup.
Now, I don’t know about you (I don’t…really. Why don’t you tell me?), but I don’t think it’s a coffee shop’s job to normalise stress and tough working lives. You might, I suppose, suggest in that very reasonable voice of yours that they are only reflecting back to us the way things actually are in our world, rather than attempting to suggest how things ought to be. But, you see, I happen to think an advert for porridge (non nom) really should be just an advert for porridge (nom…you get the idea with that…). If your wares can’t be made to seem aspirational (presuming the “tough modern lifestyle” isn’t considered to be aspirational enough, of course) then just sell them for what they are. Don’t try to tell us what our mornings or working days or family-pressured evenings should look like. And don’t make us feel guilty if we’re not killing ourselves in the ways you depict. Wouldn’t it be good if we stopped trying to normalise things that, if we all had a good long sit down and think about it, should really be considered OTT and detrimental to a properly efficient and effective society?
Or, at least, as with the coffee (and perhaps the porridge, too — I don’t know, I’ve never tried it) at least stop to think that there might be more flavours of “normal” than the media and the ad agencies think.
Oh, and I haven’t once mentioned the word pandemic — now add that to everything I’ve said above and realise just how much of the piss they’re taking every single day of our lives.
