19 October 2008

Too Much Toothpaste?

"On the one hand [the everyday] points (without judging) to those most repeated actions, those most travelled journeys, those most inhabited spaces that make up, literally, the day to day. This is the landscape closest to us, the world most immediately met. But with this quantifiable meaning creeps another, never far behind: the everyday as value and quality -- everydayness. Here the most travelled journey can become the dead weight of boredom, the most inhabited space a prison, the most repeated action an oppressive routine."
-Ben Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory

I usually consider having a variety of choices as a good thing. After all, who doesn't like being able to get precisely what you want? But in the grocery store the other day I realized that we are bombarded with so many choices in so many things, it's difficult to make a decision. Buying toothpaste did, indeed, become an oppressive routine.

It is so hard, I think, for us as a society to be impressed by anything anymore. Movies must be more expensive and have more special effects, clothes must be up-to-the-minute trendy, music must rely on gimmicks rather than talent in order to get our attention.

Whatever happened to subtlety? Has the everyday become a parody of itself?
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3 comments:

  1. ajree19/10/08 4:26 PM

    We are a society filled with excess. Sometimes that's good, sometimes bad. However, we are also a product of our own design. I'm sure some people buy toothpaste just because the box is green, it says "recycled" somewhere on it. It tastes like nothing natural on the planet, and promises to enhance your image by not only cleaning, but whitening your teeth too. They hit every button they can.

    www.jokingright.blogspot.com

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  2. Amy Noelle19/10/08 8:21 PM

    I agree with you. There are so many choices in life it's just made me a very indecisive person. Too many choices when I rent a movie with my boyfriend at blockbuster...too many fast food resturants that I can quickly eat at in Canyon Park. Everything is right there for us. We don't have to search the wide world anymore.

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  3. Joe Milutis21/10/08 4:33 PM

    I just bumped into a friend at Walgreens. His father, a Swiss banker, was in town. A man used to complexities. He needed to get a toothbrush, he left us behind to talk. After he was gone for over 15 min, we realized that he must have been having his own private struggle with whether to get 30, 35, 40, soft, medium, with tongue brusher, with curved head, with Little Mermaid design, etc. etc.

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