I’ve worked in advertising my entire adult life. I’ve spent two decades making TV commercials, billboards, tweets, Instagram posts, etc., all to make you want to buy things. My job was to create a fabricated reality in which you weren’t enough. A world where you needed things outside yourself to fix you. A world where you woke up in the morning with a negative balance and needed to work 40-80 hours a week to get enough money to buy things that will make you feel whole. The reality is that buying those things never solved the problem.
This reality is dependent on a scarcity mindset, driven by three principles:
You aren’t good enough the way you are.
What you have isn’t enough.
Whatever you’re doing, you can be doing something better.
I’ve decided to try and make an advertisement to stop buying things. An attempt at karmic cleansing my 20+ years of the promotion of buying things.
If the fundamental principle behind wanting things you don’t need is scarcity, we need to seek the contrary: abundance. You need to recognize that you are more than enough. But how do you feel that abundance? It’s simple: gratitude. Yes, the cheesy self help word that is usually written in script somewhere in your Pinterest feed. Gratitude is the antidote to scarcity and helps you to recognize:
You are enough.
You have what you need.
You are doing exactly what you are supposed to be doing.
Get out a pen and paper and write out a gratitude list. Start with 3-5 things you are grateful for. Take that list and put it somewhere you can see first thing in the morning. Maybe look at it before you start scrolling in the AM.
That is my advertisement to not buy anything.
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