Ways of Seeing by John Berger opens with: “Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.” The book is made up of 7 chapters, and the part that nudged me to write this post was the seventh — the final one. The earlier chapters lean heavily on historical artworks, especially the nudes, which didn’t quite match what I’d hoped for when I picked the book up. But the seventh chapter, where Berger really gets into the act of seeing — specifically into how advertising is constantly served up to us from every direction, pushing us to keep buying — that’s the part that grabbed me.
“The publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.” — and the broader idea that if you have nothing, you are nothing.
That passage in chapter seven is one of the lines that made me stop and think. We work for hours and hours and end up investing in things we’ll use only two or three times in our entire lives. Why are we doing this? Or we buy a pile of necessary and unnecessary things and just let them sit on a shelf. Maybe it’s the pure feeling of owning that drives us. Or maybe — because “spend” is coded into our brains on every screen, every day — we end up buying everything we see, useful or not. What do you think?
“Nobody really loves those without the power to spend. Those who do have the power to spend get loved.” — Ways of Seeing, p. 143
I went looking for daily-life examples for the line on page 143. I tried looking at the two extremes. Take Instagram. Glance at the profiles of people living flashy lives — they can have nearly millions of followers. What sets them apart? They serve up their flashy lifestyles, their wealthiest sides, with beautiful images for everyone else’s approval. You’ll say there are successful people getting followed too. Of course there are, but the exceptions don’t break the rule. On the other side, you’ll find people in very senior roles at huge companies whose follower counts don’t even pass 1,000. It all comes down to how much visual content you put out there. The other extreme is people living perfectly normal lives who publish them on social media — today’s self-marketing medium — hoping to be liked. We rarely see in them the kind of pull we see around the wealthy, again with the exceptions.
Will buying more, more, more really make us happy? Back in high school I had a fierce case of “buy every new gadget” disease. Today there isn’t a trace of it left. Are the ads I see on social media getting to me? Of course they are. They get to everyone with a pulse. To dial that down, I want to seriously cut back on how much I use Instagram. I haven’t started yet, but honestly, what social media takes from me is more than what it gives. Spending the one thing you can’t buy back in this world — time — on empty stuff hurts to think about. And yet, again and again, I fall back into the Instagram rabbit hole and watch two hours disappear in the “Explore” tab before I notice. The way to fix this, in my opinion, is to find new things that will grow you, things you can be useful with for other people. If you don’t have a concept of “vacation,” you won’t have time to spare for Instagram either.
By the way, if you work on your own thing, every moment will already feel a bit like vacation. So my advice is: grow yourself, build your own thing, and pour your time into that. I drifted pretty far from the book — but I’m not trying to give you a summary, I’m trying to share my own take on what the book made me think about. With that, take care for now.
