Marketers are the scum of the earth. They prey on people’s insecurities to sell them stuff they don’t need to impress people that don’t matter.
Nothing is “simple” or “regular” in marketing’s fantasyland — vaginal blood absorbency pads make you confident and carefree, stuffing edible corn and fat shavings make you a party stud, a fitness-related phone bracelet makes you a productivity beast and an overpriced giant lady bag will make you more of a lady.
Nowhere is this sleazy salesmanship more brazen than how my kind has ruined love for all of us.
February is suddenly the “month of love” as it marks a slump in the retail and hospitality calendar after peaking on New Year’s. Every grocery, jewellery, lifestyle, hospitality and food, and beverages brand will be busy playing cupid to our love-sick generation.
While it’s easy to call out their most blatant and fragrant bovine waste ideas, the finer ones have crawled under our skin over the years. After all, we are a bunch of primitive and impressionable apes walking on two limbs.
If I could dial back the clock to when I was a teen, I would remind myself that the most “romantic” moments are often the ones that happen at home when no one’s watching, not necessarily a candlelit dinner at an overpriced restaurant after an hour of waiting in winding queues.
Love blooms regardless of whether you gift your partner exorbitantly priced rare rocks or shiny pebbles on metal rings that can’t be used for anything just because “diamonds are forever”, or that stupid diabetes-inducing milk chocolate that has a silly heart shape that pops out.
For a generation more love-lorn and lonely than any before it, the time you spend popping each other’s pimples, failing miserably at cooking together or lazing around doing nothing particularly “romantic” makes you cherish each other a bit more.
But there’s no money to be made romanticising a burnt home-cooked meal, a quiet evening on the balcony set to 80s classics and cheap wine, or an epic movie night with comedy classics, microwave popcorn, and tonnes of kisses and squishes.
So marketers gonna market, but lovers must love.