May 7, 2025 Is Independent Thought Dying?
“ Think for yourself, or others will think for you without thinking of you.”
⁃ Henry David Thoreau
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Where have all the independent thinkers gone? This may just be the musing of an old man, thinking that in the past, people were not as quick to jump on a bandwagon as they are today. I do remember a time when advertisers wouldn’t dare ask us to advertise for them without paying us or giving us something. One of the main expenses for a business was and is the cost to let people know they were there; that’s Advertising. Somewhere between my youth and today, the Big companies figured out a way to get us to pay them to advertise for them. Through the promotion of celebrity influencers using their products, we now anxiously await the next trend set by this or that celebrity. I have long been intrigued by how cleverly we were trained to revere our celebrities in movies, TV and sports and then, by extension, further led to want to be like them, do like them and dress like them. I’m sure there are still a few of us wannabe independent thinkers out there, but we are a dying breed. It’s OK to be used for financial gain, but we should at least be aware that we are being used and expertly manipulated for financial gain. Today’s big financial gurus have refined the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses“ into an art form.
Today, they will even ask us to tell them what we like, so they won’t waste their advertising dollars showing us things we’re not interested in. Wow! That’s clever! In case you are living under the illusion that you are buying things because you want them, I would like to disabuse you of that notion. We are being gently indoctrinated into wanting to emulate well-known people, many of whom live personal lives that are in shambles. Of course, constant bombardment with the sordid details of celebrities dysfunctional families and relationships, have normalized them to the extent that we now seek out and are entertained with information about who’s cheating on or beating on whom, who’s getting divorced etc. It just seems to me, that if we would put the amount of time, energy and thought into our families and raising our children that we put into hearing the latest celebrity gossip, our lives would be more meaningful, our family relationships would be stronger, and we individually would actually be better versions of ourselves. That’s my take. What say you!
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