As I turned on the TV this morning, Frosted Flakes already in the bowl and up to the counter, I prepared myself for some light entertainment while I ate breakfast. But the entertainment was not light. It was heavy. I first saw a bunch of skinny people telling me how much weight they had lost on Nutri-System. In the background were pictures of larger, or slightly-larger, versions of their former selves. The reduced advocates were telling me how great their lives had become now that they had lost 50, 80, or even 100 pounds. My thoughts turned to my own life, how I wish I didn’t have to buy my clothes off the internet because most big & tall stores carry either big or tall. I thought about the added fees my insurance company was charging me because my obesity makes me a higher risk than the guy who receives excellent marks on the BMI. I thought about how much I hate my body and how much I want to be like those people on the commercial. Suddenly, my Frosted Flakes didn’t taste as good anymore.
Downtrodden and unsure about my reason for living, I put my empty bowl into the sink and retired to the couch for a little more TV before getting in the shower. As soon as my fat butt hit the cushion, some guy named Jillian came on, telling me that I had no excuse to be out of shape. Apparently, this scary-looking dude has a website where I can get work-out plans and dietary advice to help me get into the best shape of my life, so I decided to check it out. Wow, was I surprised. First of all, I found out that Jillian is a woman, and second, that all of her weight-loss claims were adorned with the same asterisk associated with all other weight-loss schemes, warning “results not typical.” I also found that she wanted my credit card before she would show me the proper way to do a military press.
Apparently, according to the weight-loss institutions I see advertised on TV, the internet, in magazines, on billboards, and in the coupons I receive in the mail, I need their developed expertise and training to motivate me into becoming thinner. Even more apparent is that these get-thin gurus need my money to motivate them into sharing their knowledge, knowledge with atypical results. This realization left me feeling dejected, alone, and hopeless to change my problems with my weight. Weight Watchers, Nutri-System, and HydroxyCut were more interested in my wallet than they were in my reasons for self-improvement. Jenny Craig wouldn’t even return my phone calls. These institutions, which care so much about my health and appearance, care very little for my feelings.
Companies like these exploit one of our deepest emotions: shame. Look at the faces on the “before” pictures of any of these companies’ “success stories” and you will see candid shots of unposed, unglamorous people. However, in the “after” pictures, the dieter has changed her hair color, upgraded his wardrobe, and turned his or her body so as to only allow a certain angle of the smaller gut to be shown. These newly-reduced people are always smiling and happy. From viewing these ads, I begin to make the correlation between happiness and weight loss. The ad has done its job. But, the ad neglects to tell me that I will still need to exercise and eat right in addition to partaking of its product (Upon further review, the ad does mention the need for diet and exercise in small writing, but ignores to tell me that diet and exercise is a weight-loss solution in itself).
Furthermore, are these ads doing a service to the obese population by exposing the health risks associated with obesity? No. Health risks are rarely discussed because the typical weight loss is too slight to eliminate diabetes or heart disease. The only function these products serve is to make the consumer feel bad and make the company money. Well, I already feel bad. I feel bad when my stomach hits the table every time I sit at a booth in a restaurant. I feel bad when I read stories about overweight celebrities who get yanked from a plane because their size produces a risk to the other passengers. I feel bad about my weight all the time, so I don’t need to pay these companies to help me in that department. These commercials do nothing more than eliminate the exposure of wonderful exercise products such as the ab-lounge, the thigh master, or the bow-flex (product names in lower case letter to enhance the sarcasm). Perhaps, one day, people can start feeling good about themselves again. Luckily, I just saw a commercial for pristiq to lift me out of my current funk over my weight.

--Greg

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At our house, we have a toy called the Fisher-Price Corn Popper™. It’s a simple contraption: handle, two wheels supporting a clear dome filled with various-colored and various-sized balls, and a platform that slowly lowers with the turning of the wheels until a bar beneath slips, causing the platform to “pop” back up, throwing the balls into disarray and causing the popcorn sound. Every child who visits has sought out the popper, has usually pulled it from the latest hiding place, and has proceeded to cause enough racket to produce harsh-sounding threats from the parents.

What the parents fail to see is the constant wonder each child expresses over such a simple device. Large chunks of time will be spent moving the popper back and forth, far longer than an adult can possibly tolerate. When the children become less enchanted with the noise and the action, they resort to play-acting, imagining the popper to be an elaborate vacuum, resulting in the adults’ need to constantly lift their feet.

Such entertainment and contentment is also dedicated to the devices of nature. Children will spend an hour watching a new-found bug or exploring the banks of a flowing canal. They can stare at a fire with exhilaration, thinking of new items which may or may not burn. They would burn everything they could get their hands on if their parents wouldn’t put an end to the game the moment a dirty diaper begins to sizzle.

So why can’t we adults share the same excitement over toys, bugs, or fire? Perhaps the brain craves novelty. While “crave” might be too strong a term, researchers Nico Bunzeck and Emrah Düzel have found that the brain not only responds to novelty, it improves in learning ability when novelty is present (Science Daily). The brain’s improvement with novelty makes sense because people tend to seek out the more difficult and complex devices to hold their attention. A cell phone that only serves one function (voice) is unheard of, and every day, phones are coming with more gadgets to keep the users fully engaged. Also, human interaction is being set aside as messy and archaic when compared to the enticements of Facebook and Twitter. And yet, even these media of stimulation grow tiresome day after day, week after week.

While Bunzeck and Düzel praise the function of novelty for its assistance in learning, I worry about the same stimulus-seeking in addicts. Addicts may seem to buck the trend of losing their fascination with a single subject, but they actually reinforce the need for novelty. The gambler seeks the big payoff, and the drug addict looks for the same unimaginable high of the original use. The sex addict, well, perhaps the sex addict searches for a weird, yet attractive woman with three breasts. Perhaps our boredom with our everyday lives is what prompts us to seek out drugs, or sex, or food. We need that thrill, the random variation that breaks up the monotony of our jobs and our responsibilities. Perhaps addicts are simply people who couldn’t find novelty anywhere else, or, more likely, don’t care to put in the effort it takes to seek out new hobbies. Taking a pill or eating a whole pepperoni pizza is too easy and convenient.

If this trend for novelty continues and more and more of our technological distractions become commonplace, we may well see the day of flying cars, teleporters, and bus rides to the moon. But, can technology keep up? If not, we might find ourselves literally dying from boredom.

--Greg

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In the last ten years, the movie and book industry have seen an influx of material concerning characters of superhuman qualities. Vampires, werewolves, superheroes, and wizards have dominated the big screen, and the supply of such characters appears to be limitless. So what is our fascination with these archetypes, and why have they become so dominant today?

Perhaps the most obvious answer is that these superhumans dwell outside the constructs of government-run society. They live lives where laws and regulations don’t affect them. Taxes for psychic abilities never make it into the screenplay. Immortals never deal with the difficulties of collecting their social security checks. Their world lies beyond government control and within a simpler societal construct: kill or be killed. Theirs is a construct of survival where good against evil takes precedent over the worries about immigration, oil spills, and government bailouts.

The alluring aspect to this construct is that both the good and the evil have power over their societal influence. Both have the ability to choose in what capacity they can fight for what matters to them. This is a choice which only the superhuman may possess. To be an ordinary human, in most cases, is an inability of making change beyond the familial unit. Our American government has become too big for an individual, or a small, collective group to change its current structure. When citizens united to protest bailouts and continued government spending, propelling our national debt into unfathomable levels, their voices became whispers compared to the screams of high-ranking and long-term government officials who demanded the continuation of a structure which grants them more power. As the citizens of Arizona stand up to illegal immigration, their efforts are met with scorn and threats of lawsuits which overshadow the real issue of better border security. Money and system control has become more powerful than the strongest human, but superhumans discard money and government dependency as a useless part of survival.

Vampires and wizards are beyond such worries because their need for survival offers them the ultimate independence against the will of others. These characters have become popular because they have been able to shed their need to be a collective that is reliant upon a handful of leaders to guide them. The villains can force their individual will, and the heroes can bypass regulation to enforce justice. Both sides have the strength and ability to fight for whatever passions and desires fall within their code of morals.

Today as we see the new legislature desiring to limit our ability to protect ourselves with handguns, limit our ability to compete in manufacturing and production, and limit our independence from foreign dependency, we may well begin to imagine the new versions of superhumans to emerge.

--Greg

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