This is The Nooner, a (very short) daily newsletter slash podcast that has its very own section within Dispatches from Inner Space.
To see the first post, which doubles as an explainer, click here.
Also a quick reminder that you can listen to the podcast version of each post wherever you listen to podcasts.
How to sniff out BS like a teenager
I was young when I started to see through marketing lies. Most of us were. Teenagers are truly excellent bullshit detectors. It’s only later, I think, that we become more gullible, because we get better at lying to ourselves.
How else could we be convinced that we can save money by spending it?
It would be so nice if it were true! If, by spending money on something you want, you could also save money, like the responsible adult you so desperately want to be.
As far as marketing lies go, this one is tremendously effective. We fall for it every time we even think the word “save” in the context of buying something.
But if we’re not in thrall to our consumerist lust, if we’re thinking clearly, it is plain to us that spending money is never equivalent to saving money. It’s oxymoronic.
The absolute best you can do, in an economical sense, is spend less than you would have spent on something you were definitely already going to buy. But spending less money is still not saving money. Saving money is, by root and unassailable definition, not spending it.
Unfortunately, this definition is useless to the marketers, whose only job is to get you to spend money.
And so, the brilliant psy-op was conceived. Tell people they are saving money when they buy something “on sale.” (We’ll set aside, for the moment, what a wonderful irony it is to label something already for sale as “on sale.”)
Why does this work? Are we stupid? No, we are not stupid. In fact, we are very smart. We are so smart that we are masters of self-deception.
And the best marketers are masters of exploiting our own mastery of this skill.
We want two things that are totally irreconcilable — we want to spend money, and we want to save money. What shall we do? We will look for the best argument we can find that seems to let us have both things.
Enter the marketer.
We all know better. But a lot of the time, we don’t want to know better. We want to believe the lie that we can have everything, and sacrifice nothing.
And then, inevitably, we open our gummed up eyes to the bright morning sun, and wallow in regret and resentment at the high costs of our self-deception. We’ve spent too much. We’ve saved too little.
But the marketer can hardly be blamed. He was only ever selling us what we wanted to buy. He was only ever telling us the lie that we wanted to believe.
Would that we could all more easily channel our inner teenagers, and call bullshit on our own damn selves.
Click at least one of these or else…
…you’ll never stop buying too many snacks at the grocery store.
How to sniff out BS like a teenager