Satisfied

Many of the consumerist behaviors we've developed as a society are being driven by the people who are marketing to us all the time. They teach us to be dissatisfied with what we have and even to be dissatisfied with who we are. There's a constant stream of messaging coming toward us telling us that we don't have enough that we don't do enough that we are not enough. Today on the midlife revolution, we're going to talk about how to have enough how to do enough how to be enough.

If you had to guess how many advertisements you see in a day, what would be the number 100 1000 A million. Unless you live in an unpopulated forest and you don't have a phone, and you never leave your cabin, chances are that you're receiving marketing messages all day, every day, from your mail to billboards on your daily commute to every time you pick up your phone. And let's face it, social media is one big marketing ploy. I'm even marketing to you right now. I'm trying to convince you that this podcast is worth listening to and sharing. And I'm hoping you will like subscribe and follow. marketing people want us to believe that our life is full of problems. And that day the marketing people have the solution by something, spend your money and other resources to the benefit of the people telling you about the problem. The marketers the job of a good marketer is to tell you what the problem is. Spoiler alert, it's you and then tell you how to solve it. By this. I think it started with the traveling salesman who went door to door selling solutions to overworked and possibly bored housewives. It accelerated to the home shopping network and culminated in the internet and social media was the cherry on top. The Runaway train started with solving a problem. And then it accelerated into how to solve that problem faster and then cheaper, and then how to get more customers and get them younger and keep them longer and keep them needing to come back for more and more and more.

I want to take you through the journey of a product marketing story from a product's inception through its lifecycle. The goal of every company making a product is for that product to be profitable and for its lifecycle to last as long as possible. If you look at any products on any shelf in any store in today's marketplace, you can be assured that 1000s of hours of research went into naming the product packaging the product, branding the product, distributing the product and pricing the product before it ever gets to the store shelf. In order for a product to get into a store in the first place, a company has to present the product to the buyers for that store who decide what products get on the shelf. Imagine a board meeting at the headquarters of Costco or target or Walgreens companies have to convince other companies that their business relationship will be mutually beneficial. Once a product finally does reach the shelf 1000s more hours are put into analyzing how well the product sells and under what conditions then teams of marketing people make determinations about what tiny tweaks might need to occur in order for their product to become more successful, and to have a longer life cycle. It's mind boggling to me to think how many people dedicate their lives to finding better and more profitable ways to sell us things we probably don't even need in the first place. A great example is the tobacco industry. Way back at the beginning of the formation of our country, tobacco farmers and growers just provided the dried leaves in a small tin box. Someone else made the rolling papers and the customer did the work. Then they started making pre rolled cigarettes. Then tobacco realize that some people found the smoke to be too much. So they started offering filters. Then they realized some women didn't find smoking to be ladylike. So they offered Slim's they tried to solve the problem of distaste for the strong flavor by offering menthol cigarettes. And then they started purposely marketing to kids so people would start smoking younger. Now think about distribution of a product. There are 168,000 gas stations and convenience stores in the United States, but only 62,000 grocery stores. I only mentioned this to say that if you want your product to go to the largest audience, make sure it's something that can be sold in a convenience store. According to the prevailing thinking when I was an undergraduate marketing students, a great product really only needed to meet four criteria. It needed to be a useful and valuable proposition. It needs to be simple to use and explain it It needs to be able to be distributed on a large scale, and it needs to generate a habit for the user. Cigarettes obviously, met all of those criteria. But what they didn't teach any of us in marketing class, though, were the ethics behind product creation. Companies are so focused on making money that they usually don't stop to think whether or not they should. For big tobacco, it's even worse than that. Because when they were presented with hard evidence that their product was literally killing people. They didn't stop producing cigarettes, or trying to make them safer or less addictive or restrict who they sold to voluntarily. In fact, they had to be forced to even place warning labels on each pack. It's easy to pick on cigarettes because they're largely considered to be the most harmful product ever made. But is that really true? I can think of three others that have done as much harm if not more. High fructose corn syrup is one of those high fructose corn syrup was developed by food scientists to make sugar delivery faster and easier. It can be found in a huge majority of the food that we consume. Even if you never eat any sweets, you're probably consuming high fructose corn syrup on a regular basis. According to a study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, the average daily consumption of high fructose corn syrup for children under the age of two is 132 calories a day. For a two year old of average weight that can be as much as 50% of the calories they consume. For the top adult consumers, the average calories per day that come from high fructose corn syrup are 316. If you're not if you're on a 2000 calorie diet, that's just over 15% of your daily intake. The scary part is you may not even know you're consuming it if you're not reading every single label. High fructose corn syrup is in soda and sweets. Sure, but did you also know that it's in things like bread and milk, and even in foods we think of as healthy like yogurt and lunch meat. If people are unaware, and they think they're eating healthy, there may be a reason for that extra 15% of body weight.

Another product example is rapeseed oil, which is widely available here in the United States. It's banned in Europe, however, over concerns about a Rusick acid. I'm just going to call it E A. But it Rusick acid is required by the FDA to be less than 2% of rapeseed oil, which was rebranded as canola oil in the 70s. Presumably because the name was less distasteful, however, ie a concentration can be as high as 52%. It Rusick acid can cause heart problems and digestive difficulties. But its effects are controversial, because it's low in saturated fat, and high in unsaturated fat, which is usually presented to us as the good kind, the kind found found in things like avocados. Even today, the first several articles that come in and assert come up in a search for rapeseed oil are overwhelmingly positive, despite scientific evidence to the contrary. The real danger is that when rapeseed oil is hydrogenated, and again, the reason for hydrogenation is too severe, so solve the commercial drive to do everything faster, easier and cheaper. hydrogenated rapeseed oil makes things more spreadable. Unfortunately, again, you may not even know how much of this oil you're consuming, because it's been added not only to things you would expect, like margarine and peanut butter, but things you would never expect like medication, toothpaste, and cosmetics. As bad as the last two mentions are, there's one product that I think is far worse. And it's a product that's used to treat the crops of the corn and the seeds that make the previous two products. It's called glyphosate. Glyphosate is the main ingredient in the weed killer branded as Roundup. And according to the California Ecology Center, the surfactant ingredient in Roundup is more acutely toxic than glyphosate itself, and the combination of the two is yet more toxic. Glyphosate is suspected of causing genetic damage, which could be the reason why our overall health in the United States has declined steadily since roundup started being used in the 1970s. Glyphosate is also acutely toxic to fish and birds, and can kill beneficial insects and soil organisms that maintain ecological balance. Dr. Zack Bush talks about how we in the United States have seen an explosion of chronic disease over the last 25 years. He notes that there are many factors contributing to the decline of our health like spending too much time indoors and becoming totally disconnected from nature. But the major leader to the decline in the nutrients in our food can be directly tied to glyphosate. He says, quote, We spray more than 4.5 billion pounds of glyphosate into the soils, plants and water systems of our planet. And there are now dozens of genetically modified plant species around the world which have allowed chemical companies to vet to develop a seemingly infinite market for their weed killers. And after Roundup Ready crops were introduced in the mid to late 1990s. This water soluble toxin would subsequently work its way into the water within the grains, fruits and vegetables, as well as infiltrating the groundwater, slowly making its way into rivers, oceans, our air, and ultimately our rainfall. Not surprisingly, the diseases in our domesticated animals from pets to livestock have followed a similar trajectory. That's Dr. Zack Bush. And lest you think that glyphosate isn't working its way into the food you eat. Earlier this year, it was reported by Matt Rosa, that an environmental working group study tested 21 Oat based cereal and snack products for glyphosate, and found that 17 of them contain glyphosate at levels considered unsafe for children, including multiple brands of Cheerios.

Now, what does this have to do with being satisfied or the opening of this episode where we started talking about marketing? Well, it's an interesting contemplation. As you look around your house at the things you've collected and asked yourself, why do I have so much stuff? Where did it come from? And why did I decide to buy it? Why do I wear the clothes I wear? How did I decide what my skincare routine would be? Why does my life look this way? So many of us are walking around being marketed to and we don't even realize it, we're buying things we don't need to make our lives look the same as other people's lives. Without stopping to think about whether it's the life we want, or not. Think about how many storage companies exist in the area where you live. I've seen new storage units pop up all over the place recently. And it's kind of like, they advertise about having a second closet or a second garage or a place to store your stuff. But the question is, why do we have so much stuff that doesn't fit in our houses anyway? What's in your life that you don't need? All of the things in our lives take up space and resources? What would it be like if we took back some of that time and energy by getting rid of some things? Over the last year, I've been transforming the way that I think and feel about my body. This journey will definitely be part of the podcast, but I'm trying to take you through my own revolution in a particular order. So we will get to all of that later. But I mentioned this because a few months ago, I made the decision that I was ready to tackle my clothing situation. I knew that I was holding on to way too many things that I didn't need, including clothes that didn't fit but that I hoped would fit again one day in my journey to love my body exactly as it is. I decided that holding on to clothes that didn't fit was not a very loving thing to do. I was unconsciously saying to myself, you're okay the way you are. But when you're smaller, you'll have more things to wear. I asked myself, what would it be like to love your body at the size it is now and stop holding on to things that don't serve this body right now. Wouldn't it be more loving to let go of those things that fit a body that doesn't exist anymore? So one Saturday morning, I told my partner Samuel that I was ready to clean out my closet. This must have been really exciting for him because he immediately told me to sit on the couch and get comfortable. I have something I want to read you he said. He then picked up a book. I had seen it sitting on his table for many months. It was Marie condos, the life changing Magic of Tidying Up. Now I looked at this book on his end table and I saw that it has this New York Times bestseller sticker on it. And it says 3 million copies sold. And I contemplated buying this book at one point but it kind of makes me chuckle a little bit because I wonder how many of those 3 million copies are sitting on a shelf somewhere having never been opened, never been read never utilized the tips on the inside of this book. And I had heard of the Does it spark joy question and had kind of pondered it to myself over the years but never did anything about it. So maybe that little book on the table was speaking to me each time I looked at it, and I finally decided to listen. I closed my eyes. And Samuel read to me these words.

What standard do you use to decide what to get rid of? There are several common patterns when it comes to discarding. One is to discard things when they cease being functional, for example, when something breaks down beyond repair, or when part of the set is broken. Another is to discard things that are out of date, such as clothes that are no longer in fashion, or things related to an event that has passed. It's easy to get rid of things when there's an obvious reason for doing so. It's much more difficult when there's no compelling reason. Various experts and proposed yardsticks for discarding things people find hard to part with these includes such rules as discard anything you haven't used for a year. And if you can't decide, pack those items away in a box and look at them again six months later. This part is bolded. She says however, the moment you start focusing on how to choose what to throw away, you have actually veered significantly off course, in this state is that it is extremely risky to continue tidying. At one point in my life, I was virtually a disposal unit. After discovering the art of discarding when I was 15. I focused on how to get rid of things. And my research efforts escalated. I was always looking for new places to practice be at my siblings rooms or the communal storage lockers at school. My head was full of tidying tips and I had complete albeit misguided confidence that I could tidy any space. My particular goal at the time was to get rid of as much as possible. I applied every criteria suggested by the various books I read on reducing. I tried getting rid of clothes that I hadn't worn for two years discarding another item. Every time I bought something new and throwing away anything I wasn't sure of. I threw out 30 bags of garbage in one month. But no matter how much I discarded not a single room in my house felt any tidier. In fact, I found myself going shopping just to relieve the stress, and so failed miserably to reduce the total volume of my possessions. At home. I was always uptight constantly on the lookout for superfluous things that can be discarded. When I found something not in use, I would pounce on it vengefully and throw it in the garbage. Not surprisingly, I became increasingly irritable and tense and found it impossible to relax even in my own home. One day after school I opened the door to my room to begin cleaning as usual. At the sight of that untidy space. I finally lost it. I don't want to tidy anymore. I cried. plopping myself down in the middle of my room, I began to think I had spent three years tidying and discarding things yet my room still felt cluttered with someone please tell me why my room isn't tidy when I worked so hard at it. Although I did not say this out loud. In my heart, I was practically shouting. At that moment, I heard a voice look more closely at what is there? What do you mean, I look at what's here so closely every day I can drill a hole through it all. With that thought still in my head, I fell fast asleep right there on the floor. If I had been a little smarter, I would have realized before I became so neurotic that focusing solely on throwing things away, can only bring unhappiness. Why? Because we should be choosing what we want to keep, not what we want to get rid of. When I woke up, I knew immediately what that voice in my head had meant. look more closely at what is there. I had been so focused on what to discard on attacking the unwanted obstacles around me that I had forgotten to cherish the things that I loved the things I wanted to keep. Through this experience, I came to the conclusion that the best way to choose what to keep and what to throw away is to take each item in one's hand and ask, Does this spark joy? If it does, keep it if not dispose of it. This is not only the simplest but also the most accurate yardstick by which to judge. Of course, that's her opinion. But after having been through this process, it's pretty effective. You may wonder about the effectiveness of such a vague criteria, but the trick is to handle each item. Don't just open up your closet and decide after a cursory glance that everything in it gives you a thrill. You must take each outfit in your hand. When you touch a piece of clothing your body reacts its response to each item is different. Trust me and try it. I chose this standard for a reason. After all, what is the point in tidying. If it's not so that our space and things in it can bring us happiness, then I think there's no point at all. Therefore, the best criterion for choosing what to keep and what to discard is whether keeping it will make you happy, whether it will bring you joy. Are you happy wearing clothes that don't give you pleasure? Do you feel joy when surrounded by piles of unread books that don't touch your heart? Do you think that owning accessories you know you'll never use will ever bring you happiness? The answer to these questions should be no. Now imagine yourself living in a space that contains only things that spark joy? Isn't this the lifestyle you dream of? And this part is involved to keep only those things that speak to your heart. Then take the plunge and discard all the rest. By doing this, you can reset your life and embark on a new lifestyle.

Those few paragraphs started a revolution. One that is ongoing to this day. And one of the reasons I chose this title for my podcast. You'll have to stay tuned, however, to find out what happened on my tidying journey and where I am along the path today in the next few episodes of the midlife revolution