The Disease of Infinite Desire: We Love Stuff

People often watch the Super Bowl just for the commercials and the halftime entertainment. Commercials produce our consumption habits. Digital marketing experts estimate that most Americans are exposed to around 4,000 to 10,000 ads each day. This year one particular Super Bowl commercial caught our attention: the Expedia commercial. The narrator ends the commercial, after reviewing all of the stuff we might want to consume, with: “do you think any of us will look back on our lives and regret all the things we didn’t buy?” The French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, argued that there was more to anomie than the sense of deep individual dislocation resulting from the Industrial Revolution. For him anomie is foremost about what he called the “malady of infinite aspiration.” This arises when there are “no limits to men’s aspirations” because they “no longer know what is possible and what is not, what is just and what is unjust, which claims and expectations are legitimate and which are immoderate.” Michael J. Thompson, in his essay on moral atrophy, argues that this is a kind of alienation from our own cognitive processes, our own autonomous ability to make moral decisions, without resorting to conformity of the group. We’re reminded by the Expedia commercial that our deepest longings are linked to the things we can buy and even our deaths can be troubled by what we have yet to consume. It’s the disease of infinite desire. See three episodes of the disease of infinite desire here: One , Two, and Three

Expedia at the the Superbowl: We Love Stuff