Force of Nature

There was this one week where I failed as a blogger. After months of keeping up with the two posts a week schedule, I completely neglected my blog and didn’t write a single post. I did try, oh how I tried to push out coherent thoughts that sounded at least somewhat normal but with no luck. Finally, I arrived at a point where I simply gave up and didn’t try to force words and here we are, a couple of days later and everything seems to be back to normal. And from that emerged the topic of this post, if you force yourself into liking something, it doesn’t work but why is it that when you are manipulated by force of advertising it works wonders?

I myself am a fan of advertising in general. It’s a concept I find very interesting and I actually did my Bachelor’s on a topic that was strongly related to advertising. I find it useful and, at the same time, a force of evil and yet it is completely unavoidable when it comes to every day life – adverts are around us everywhere, brands, celebrities – everything is advertised through a filter, through social media, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t interest me from every angle.

The movie world is no different, with having probably the biggest influence on me personally, the whole system of it just seems so complicated and thrilling at the same time. We are fed information constantly, names, characters, teasers, trailers, trailers for trailers and for some reason, I still sometimes catch myself falling for the same old tricks again and again. Though there are innovators in the world of advertising, the basic fundamental elements of posters and trailers have remained the same. I mean, the same kind of design we see on one horror movie poster is destined to be on the other. The same kind of tricks are used in other mediums as well, and it’s almost like brainwashing if you think about it – we are without a doubt tricked into wanting something, needing to see something and spending money on it due to the way things are advertised towards us.

One of the more interesting aspects of the force of advertising  is apparent with one of the most hyped movies this year, the sequel to Avengers. It was everywhere before it hit the cinemas, it was on our brains, it was in our DNA and what happened? It fell apart. Part of me thinks that this was due to the amount of advertising around it, the force was so strong and apparent that it made the movie, that was not necessarily weak, sound so much better than it would have ever been. It’s parallel to the idea of nature, where it is part of life and necessary in so many ways, but with bigger, uncontrollable forces of nature, like hurricanes or earthquakes, everything around it will be destroyed. Advertising has the same effect – the stronger its force, the more it destroys in its wake. Sometimes it’s the brains of fans, other times it’s the movie itself.. and it’s a force of nature that is as common as trees producing oxygen.

So as apparent as this connection is, there is another one that brought me to advertising in the first place – the force of motivation. Understanding that forces in controllable amounts are necessary, and that the bigger the force, the more destructive it is, I realized that motivation works exactly the same way except it’s its own black hole. The more motivation you push out towards a result, the more you try, the more you push and push, the less you are able to achieve because it isn’t enjoyable anymore. Being motivated is amazing, yet, the more you are, the more you feel like you need to succeed and the less you end up doing. Or is it just me? Or is any of it even remotely logical? Who knows.. I’m running on low motivation right now because clearly, using too much of it is useless to me.