Unsatisfied, Satisfaction

Who doesn’t want a little satisfaction?  My friend Brian McNitt posted a gorgeous video of Devo performing the Rolling Stones’ hit “Satisfaction” on Saturday Night Live in 1978.

Here, conversationally, I offer The Replacements’ version of yearning delivered via music.  Unsatisfied:

iPromise

How’s your iLife going?

I’m asking because I’m curious. I’m curious about whether or not your iLife is what you’d imagined – what you’ve been promised.

Mine isn’t, but I’m not surprised. Consumer advertising, after all, promises us far more in regards to products and services than what any product or service is capable of delivering. Deep spiritual satisfaction from a walkman? Social fulfillment and a permagrin from a hard drive full of jpgs? Become the toast of your friends (which of course, number in the scores and consist of supermodel geniuses and dapper playboys) thanks to your German engineered car? I learned fairly well to look through the veneer of consumer advertising when I was a freshman in college and read Ways of Seeing, by John Berger. But consumer advertising is an adaptive beast, relentless and ever more persuasive.

In a world where massive, empty promises are routinely made, what are the consequences for our expectations of the world – most specifically and critically of the other people in our lives? After all, people make and keep (or don’t keep) promises. Implicit, explicit, marriage, work, etc. If any number of 1,000’s of things in the world can be promoted as panaceas for a yearning in us (a yearning I’d say has been amplified and manipulated to respond to the promises of advertising), what kind of fulfillment expectations arise? Am I likely to work through a difficult stretch in a relationship when I’m pretty well conditioned to believe there’s a newer, better one out there that will require less work and will provide greater – if not complete – fulfillment?

iWonder, if we stripped our world of the context of accepted empty promises of fulfillment, would we re-adapt and learn to nurture our relationships better? Would we still have a 50% divorce rate? Consider this passage from an article on Askmen.com, wherein the author plainly argues that women and men change after marriage (for the worse) and that doing so is fundamentally unfair:

Why shouldn’t one have a say if their wife or husband puts on too much weight from sitting on the couch and eating nachos all day? When you buy a car, a BMW for instance, you expect it to remain a BMW. The car won’t become a GoodYear blimp with time, it will inevitably get old but will always remain a BMW.

This, from an article categorized under “marriage advice.” Complete article on Askmen.com. Would anyone else read this and wonder why, oh why, anyone would compare a person to a product and expect a human being to behave like a car? Yet, I find this way of “philosophy” prevalent. And seeing its prevalence turns me away from marriage. It’s not the changing spouse I’m afraid of – it’s the likely expectation in her that I’ll be like that car. It’s the shameful recognition that, in me, there’s the same expectation of her.

It’s the knowledge that we all judge one another against the expectations made by impossible promises – iPromises, if you will.