The Industry Makes Us Feel Guilty: Enemies Of Our Will

The human being as a species, people in their evolution have had to face increasingly sophisticated challenges, at a frenetic speed, without biology having been able to keep up with that pace. Thus, with bodies designed to hunt and protect ourselves in difficult conditions, today we face technological challenges. In this way, we will talk about how the industry makes us feel guilty.

To do so, we will take as a reference the magnificent book The Enemy Knows the System  by Marta Peirano. In it, the journalist reviews how knowledge about the functioning of our mind makes us vulnerable, very vulnerable to the interests of certain companies when it comes to motivating consumption.

The industry makes us guilty

Today, we know, for example, that happy music encourages us to buy faster. That calm music encourages us to stay longer in one place. What do you hear in a department store? What music is in the background in a very expensive store? Sure, then we get home and how can we feel after having bought so many little necessary items or having spent so much money. Yes, the industry makes us feel guilty.

We also feel guilty when we cannot stop eating so-called junk food. When we try again and again to improve our diet and “fail.” Do we think about how this type of food is designed?

In Marta’s words, “ we prefer to think that we are skirmishers without an ounce of discipline than to believe that one of the most powerful and toxic industries on the planet maintains extraordinarily motivated teams of geniuses with exorbitant salaries and laboratories with the latest technology, whose only The purpose is to manipulate us without our realizing it ” .

In other words, there are a lot of people and technology working to break our will. So, I ask you, have you ever stopped to think about the power you face?

To an entire industry that sells cheap and very unsatisfying food due to its low nutritional value. This produces a paradox: that there are obese people and at the same time malnourished, because quantity has little or nothing to do with quality.

Prepared for people who make the act of selecting what they eat an impulsive act, given the lack of time and cognitive energy, and the many pressures they have to endure. On the other hand, given the concern for the diet that grows in society, many of the recipes of yesteryear are disguising themselves as healthy.

Thus, we can see in their packaging people practicing sports or phrases in forms of attention call that point out what the product does not have, forgetting what it does have. This is how the industry makes us feel guilty.

Some industries have tried to reduce the level of sugar in their food; however, what they have seen in their statistics is that sales are down. As Marta says, “it is that it is easier to generate an addiction than to end it. “

On the other hand, it is a cycle that we enter from when we are little. “My first cereals”, “My first soup”, healthy articles that have potentially addictive ingredients and little or no healthy.

Consumption in the network

In one way or another, the industry wants us to not stop consuming. What is fashionable now? Platforms a la carte with a lot of series that have several seasons.

Cinema, the format limited in time, with rare second and third parts, has been replaced by a platform that serves us one chapter after another without interruptions and at an “affordable price”.

The industry makes us feel guilty. If not, what emotion predominates after having spent a whole afternoon in front of the TV with the agenda full of pending points? The dressing is social media. Before we unlocked the terminal without realizing it to look at the time, or so we justified it, because the second we had no idea what time it was.

Now the automatism is social networks. Infinite scrolling sites that offer us a personalized look for us to stay. You can go, for example, to your Facebook wall and go down and down and down and down, and shared stories of your acquaintances or videos of dogs or food that look great will continue to appear. The point is that, to get out of it, you have to regain control of your attention.

A complicated task because those who have designed the platform have done it so that you can stay there, in its virtual place, as long as possible. People who are not exactly stupid and who have all the knowledge we have today about how our mind works. A knowledge that they do not hesitate to exploit.

Thus, the industry makes us feel guilty. Very guilty. Because sad we eat ice cream and we abandon ourselves. Because when hopelessness appears, which in many cases is a derivative of our own guilt, we are even more instinctive. This is how in reality and in the cinema, the protagonist ends up eating ice cream in front of the television.