How working in advertising helped me understand how we create our own realities and gain autonomy over our lives by reclaiming and reframing our attention.
As an environmentalist, I’ve sometimes felt shame as I look back at my past. I studied a business degree where I remember profit and economic growth was celebrated as the number one motive, exploitative economies of scale and assembly lines were seen as the greatest innovations and globalisation and outsourcing of work to low cost counties seen as progress. As an artistic person, my creativity was naturally funnelled into ‘marketing’, which for a long time I thought was one of the few places I would comfortably be paid for my creativity.
When I graduated, I got a job in advertising, under the guise of the ‘creative industries’, an appealing mirage for what I discovered to be a well-designed mind-manipulation machine. My creative spark was used to sell cruises, razors and microwaveable rice. I’d craft narratives to build false identities for people to desire, and then pay for. And the crux of it all: I’d get a wage for it, while my good-intentioned creativity — my own music and art — seemed to only ever require investment. I ended up feeling like capitalism’s baby, a cloned cog in a well oiled system. Within a year, I’d recognised the illusion, and quit to travel from London-Morocco in a campervan for 8 months.
But there was a key benefit my marketing background provided me with. I understood the power of framing perspective.
In an era of fake news, personalised social media algorithms and polarised politics, it seems we live in a world of many parallel perspectives.
A question often occupying my mind is whether there can ever truly be an objective reality. When a chameleon has two eyes which move independently of each other, and bats see in infrared, and Jair Bolsonaro sees the Amazon as a pile of resources not a vital life source — how can we possibly know the same world.
What I’ve come to learn is, we all live in realities of our own creation. We don’t necessarily see things as they are. We see them as we are. Life reflects back our most frequent thoughts on what we believe our lives to be.
This concept became clear to me when floating in the ocean one day. I had a tough time learning to swim as a child. As a 5 year old I remember grabbing onto my swimming instructor’s leg in a state of panic as the other children swam to the pool’s edge, while all the parents watched from the sidelines. Fast forward 20 years as I lay stretched out on the sea’s surface, I recognised how the water reacts to our thoughts. It’s ready to carry us, but we think we’re drowning as we desperately grasp its fluctuating form. We could just lie on our backs and let it hold us. Water is reactive: try slapping the surface and it will slap back, but caress it and it responds with a soft embrace. It quite literally reflects our outlook back to us.
What I learned working in advertising, is that the goal was never necessarily being a money magnet. The goal of advertising is getting your attention — and then influencing and shaping it. And ironically, the way we give attention is to ‘pay it’.
In the digital age, attention is currency. Digital games, videos and music are free — if only you view a 30 second ad. Unlike our ancestors, we have a wealth of information simply with a wifi connection. But we have the same amount of mental processing power, and the amount of minutes in the day has remained unchanged.
“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
Herbet A. Simon
Everywhere you look, an advertisement is trying to ‘capture’ you. Billboards on the road, pop ups on the screen, audio ads on the radio, product placement on films.
If all we ever have is this moment, then your attention = your life. And if every empty space is cluttered with a never-ending stream of messages, then our mindspace becomes commodified. Whether you purchase the product or not, our captured attention means our very lives are for sale. Our attention is hardly our own anymore, so it’s no surprise that the powers of politics and commerce manipulate it so easily. With our attention owned, our perspectives become malleable.
Reclaiming control over our attention holds the keys to everything. We have the power to shift our own perspectives, and when we do, we change the way we experience life.
I directly observed this in transforming the way I viewed fitness and exercise. I used to view muscle aches and being out of breath as uncomfortable. But a reframed angle changed everything. I began to feel pleasure in feeling my body’s edges as my muscles burned. My heavy breathing would make me feel more alive as my body sustained me like a vigorous engine. I can push harder for longer and my fitness levels skyrocketed. I shifted my view from pain, to that of ‘sensation’. I realised suffering only comes when pain is resisted — and not from pain itself. A simple shift of perspective helped me to realise the way to a full life, is to feel more alive in pleasure and in pain. Shifting perspective doesn’t mean you’re ignorant to the uncomfortable parts — quite the opposite. It means you’re accepting it, then choosing your outlook.
Ultimately we can never know if there’s an objective reality, we can’t control what happens outside of us. But what we have for sure, is our choice of perspective. And that has the power to transform our worlds.
All images are my own.
