Advertising Is Killing Us Softly

Ads are everywhere in todays society. We see an average of 3,000 per day, most of which trying to make you buy into an idea or purchase a product. The majority of those ads also feature women and men, who are by societies standards, beautiful. 

However, those men and women are not naturally that beautiful. They are edited and photoshopped into looking like that. We saw a video from Dove earlier in the term showing how much editing is done to an average person to make her look flawless. 

These ads are trying to sell their products and create a concept of "normal". Many of the ads try to sell the concept that the most important thing about women is their beauty. It's all about what the physical outside looks like, not the inside and their personality. 

We may think that ads don't effect us but in reality they do. After seeing the concept of "normal" and the unrealistic view of beauty it sinks deep into our minds. It subconsciously makes us want to strive to be those things. We buy the products in an attempt to look more beautiful, the way they portray it on the commercials and billboards, when really that will never happen because even the beauty in the commercial is fake. 

The product isn't what makes you pretty, it's the editing that does. If people could realize that nobody really looks like that, they could view themselves and beauty more realistically.

Impatience: A Growing Problem

I think the majority of people will agree that impatience is a growing problem, even though they're part of the problem themselves. I don't think anybody can really avoid being impatient these days, especially younger people.

We're living in a world where everything is handed to us. My generation was about the last to remember a time without the internet. I still had a computer as a child though. We've grown up accustomed to these things and wouldn't even be able to imagine a place without the world wide web or cell phones. I would die without it!

If I don't get service on my phone for even two minutes I feel panicked and stressed. I feel disconnected from the world and lost, even if I wasn't planning on talking to anyone at that time anyways. Today we need technology to survive. We're dependent on it and it's made us very impatient.

We're used to having everything handed to us. We need constant entertainment to keep us busy. When we don't have it we freak out. We don't know how to be patient and wait for things to come. We get more and more easily irritated and straight up rude if things don't go exactly as planned.

I honestly don't think this problem can be fixed and if it can it would take an extremely long time. I believe we are impatient because of the fast technology we have now. Unless we take technology away from children at a young age and spend more hands on time teaching them like we used to I think it will just get worse and worse.

Maybe if it gets bad enough people will open their eyes more and treat it like going green. Unless it becomes an unbearable problem or a threat to everyone I doubt people will be willing to change.

Reality TV

Even though reality TV is extremely popular in American culture I don't think it's a good thing. For many people, it doesn't effect their views, but for some I believe it can be used as an excuse for bad behavior.

Reality TV can relate to you, but it isn't relating to your every day life. Some of the drama can be realistic, some of the issues and topics brought up are realistic but in reality TV everything is overblown and out of proportion. Every fight turns into a physical brawl, every issue ends with girls screaming at each other or guys getting black eyes. Most of the time, people on reality TV don't talk things out. Instead they beat the crap out of each other and then go drink some more.

It seems that shows like the Real World and Jersey Shore focus on the bad aspects of our popular culture. It focuses on drinking, fighting, petty drama and people having sex. Sure that relates to people, but not most people. I believe some people use shows and examples like this to justify their bad behavior when really it shouldn't be justified at all.
At the same time I think that's why those shows are so popular. The majority of people don't act like that, and though it's an embarrassment to our culture it's interesting to watch people push the limit and act overly ridiculous. I know personally when I've been really mad I would have loved to leap across a room screaming and pull the person I'm fighting withs hair out. But I'm a more rational person and I would never do something like that.

By watching reality TV you're about to see things you wish you could do or would never imagine doing. You can live it through other people on TV so you don't have to look like an idiot yourself.

I believe the largest archetypes in reality TV are macho muscular looking guys and skinny attractive promiscuous girls. Basically every character on Jersey Shore if you took the guido out of them. In every reality show there is always one or more of these people. They act the same way and look about the same way but always have different personalities or personalities that are way too strong and similar. They always fight and clash so there ends up being "attractive" people drinking around and wrestling each other.