We’ve marketed everything wrong
As I get older, I find myself muttering, “everything is just marketing” all the time.
And a lot of this everything has been marketed to us incorrectly.
For example, EXERCISE.
Why, please, has it been presented to us as a form of punishment? A joyless, puritan act to be performed at a gym in front of large mirrors with criminally hideous lighting????
Why did we make moving our bodies so much about how they look and not how they feel?
(I know why, because diet culture makes money and runs on shame, but let me ask the question here to stop myself from becoming one of those people who yell things righteously on the bus).
I was a teenager in the age of Kate Moss’s infamous “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” quote, and I wasted just so many of my precious young person years self-flagellating with secret bedtime ab crunches, stepping onto the scales and making moral judgments about what I found there, denying myself things like food and sleep.
Now, three and a bit years into clawing my way out of a life-changing illness, which has taken from me the privilege to exercise when and how and if I want, I’m like GUYS HELLO MOVEMENT IS SO GOOD WHY DID NOBODY SAYYYYYYY
And!!!! It can be whatever you want it to be!!! Doesn’t have to be awful in order to count!!!!
Did you know you can put Enya on and pretend to be a contemporary dancer in your living room?
You can angry-stomp to that French Revolution song from Les Miserables when you’re full of rage but also whimsy!
You can do grandma style breaststroke in the ocean, head above water, pace of a snail. You can lift up something heavy at home in your pajamas - you could even light candles and make doing weights cosy?? You could ride a horse! Or do the Macarena in the kitchen. Take archery lessons like I’m going to soon because I have this long held secret fantasy that I’m gonna turn up and just naturally shoot like Katniss Everdeen. Or you could do something that appeals to you and not me - like, I dunno, chase a ball back forth on a big patch of grass with other people? Run, but like, not because you’re being chased?
I’ve seen it said online that thriving in your thirties is basically just doing all the things you liked as a kid. Certainly, I have needed to find ways to remind myself who I am, and so often that has meant finding my way back to her, to the younger me before she took on SO MUCH OF THE WORLD’S GODFORSAKEN BLOODY MARKETING.
What else is marketed incorrectly?
Climate change. We should’ve made it less “help save the polar bears” (altruistic, geographically distant, easy to push down the priority list) and more “you won’t have anywhere to live if you set it on fire” (urgent, selfish, motivating).
Masculinity. Why so rigid and macho? Why so scared of all emotions except anger? Why so limiting and frightening and easily weaponised?
Oh hang on a second -
SPEAKING OF THINGS WE HAVE MARKETED OR HAD AGGRESSIVELY MARKETED AT US TO OUR DETRIMENT AS A SPECIES
Please see this article I wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald about marriage being popular again.
And also this one about how a life without children can actually be lovely and full and meaningful, not miserable and pitiable and barren.
OK alright here endeth the rant. For now.
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ENTHUSIASM is a newsletter for people who feel strongly about things. Like, for example, apple crumble, human rights, and the Delta Goodrem album Innocent Eyes. Here, we contain multitudes.
Kate Leaver is an author, podcast producer and former professional fairy. You can find her on Instagram or find out more about her at kateleaver.com
A new Enthusiasm post is always a great way to start my day. You ask the best questions in such a straightforward and uplifting way.
Is reconnecting with things you loved when you were younger another way of saying, “be your authentic self and not what you’ve been told or taught to be?”
Even at age eight I knew I couldn’t openly be my authentic self with the parents I had but I knew who I am.
Somewhere along the line I found the courage to be joyous. And yes, it appears to scare the hell out of some people. I’m no longer willing to make their insecurities my problem.
Love you Kate!!!
Always loving your enthusiasm Kate! I was thinking about being a woman in my 50s who seems to be also re-connecting with things I loved when I was younger. And then I read an interview with the DJ Sarah Cox, 51 and she said exactly the same thing.
It is a wonderful thing to recognise the space that opens up to us at different times of our lives and how we want to fill that space joyfully and in a way that 'feeds the soul'!
The biggest marketing con of all is that we must achieve, succeed, gain, do and actually maybe the purpose of life is just TO BE, and be loved in our being and love in return!
Here's to creating a new sales pitch ♥️