So You Wanna Take A Holiday?

So You Wanna Take a Holiday

 

First, horror beyond imagining:  remember to stare directly at it for as long as you can bear to and try not to look away.  I know that everything in your body will try and convince you to do something, anything else, but it is vital that you do not ignore it if you are to understand, viz. that it works on you BECAUSE you ignore it.

 

 



 

"By keeping parents in a state of chronic anxiety, psychiatry thus frustrates desires that advertising can then claim to satisfy"

-Lasch, the Culture of Narcissism

 

Imagine:  You've accidentally raised children with no inner resources.  You're 45 and relations with your spouse have cooled.  You have no idea what's gone wrong and you are in the process of despairing.  The lack of inner resources means that you are your child's only resource in the absence of screens.  Hence a problem:  you cannot change your aesthetic reality i.e. go on holiday without being treated like an IPhone by your offspring.  Do you want to know what it feels like to be clicked on?  You're about to find out.

 

In other words, you're straight out of a textbook.  The purpose of this advert is to conceal the fact that you are an expected and accounted for byproduct of modern life.  Instead, the entirely predictable development of your way of life and the attendant ennui is, in the course of this advert, presented to you as being a mistake, an accidental wrong turn which Capitalism can correct.  This is a false premise because it is Capitalism which ushered in the reign of this problem.  Why would it rob Peter to pay Paul when Peter and Paul are both at Cannes sipping Cristal?  You think that's Sea Air you're breathing?

 

The problem that this couple have is not a lack of time to "Relax".  They have more time on their hands than any previous generation.  The problem is a lack of inner resources, that is, a lack of those things which make time pass without stimulus.  When the quirky host child holds up a book and says "there's a chance you won't get past the first page", that is an instruction, not a warning.

 

"No time to chill out - what's that all about?"

 

Chilling out is a completely new concept for human beings.  In the past we spoke of reflection, contemplation, meditation, but these were seen as aspects of striving, of living.  This is a new era, where you are expected to empty your mind other than through the performance of repetitive tasks. 

 

It doesn't work. 

 

There are two reasons.  Firstly, instructing yourself not to think is impossible; it's a classic way of inducing the mystic state.  Truly kind masters ask us to perform impossible tasks precisely because they know how spectacularly we will fail, and that THAT is the lesson.  Cruel masters ask us to try and improve ourselves in ways which seem feasible ("finish a novel on holiday") but are more ruinous because, when you achieve it and aren't Enlightened the problem must be you "didn't do it right".  Hence every college student asks his instructor for Frameworks and a generation raised on porn defers to quantitative measures to decide if they enjoyed sex.  Hence lifecoaches.

 

When Jesus told us that anyone who thought adulterously was an adulterer, the point wasn't that you, subjectively, were cheating.  The point was that everyone, objectively, was a hypocrite.  But you only get to say that with any justice if you've honestly tried to stop being a monster.  Protip: you are a monster. 

 

This brings us back to the couple in the advert.  They're not monsters, they're not even adulterers.  That is because they are fictional beings.  Only a lunatic would call for their stoning ever.  "Who Stoned Roger Rabbit?" is self evidently absurd and yet, admit it, you were bearing their feelings in mind weren't you? 

 

However, the double bind is that millions stone themselves every day for their failure to not want to stone themselves.  They know they should aspire to rock hard abs and children who speak Mandarin but honestly, who can be bothered?

 

The answer is nobody.

 

The answer is, also, everybody.

 

That's the only Enlightenment that the 21st Century is offering, take it or leave it.