This ad struck me as the culmination of a long-standing trend. I struggled to articulate it at the time, but I’ll attempt to do just that in this ar

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2024-12-21 13:30:02

This ad struck me as the culmination of a long-standing trend. I struggled to articulate it at the time, but I’ll attempt to do just that in this article.

Let’s start by the ad itself. It carries implicit symbols and memes, whose interpretations will vary wildly from person to person, but in general I believe it attempts to convey these subtle messages:

Relying only on external validation, specially from foreign entities, as a means to sustain one’s self-esteem is a time honored strategy to produce nefarious results. Yet, it’s celebrated by certain influencers, mainstream media, TV shows, ads and movies that attempt to distort a small sample into a normality.

When external validation is postulated as a basic human need, and one’s default natural, vanilla body is not sufficient to garner the validation one needs (as the above ad suggests), it soon follows that external interventions are required to achieve it.

I was fortunate enough to grow in an environment where artificial external displays of vanity were seen as a quirk, and sometimes even frowned upon (depending on the situation), thus not a requirement for a happy and fulfilled life. But once one is born or dislodged into the eye of a hurricane, it is hard to see the surrounding damage, especially when peers abide by those standards, generating an underlying group integration peer pressure.