spare choices

-I checked in at Amazon a few minutes ago and found out my Today's #1 Recommendation is a film I'd never heard of called Sleeping Beauty.

"After her mother commits suicide, nineteen year old Lucy Harmon travels to Italy to have her picture painted. However, she has other reasons for wanting to go. She wants to renew her acquaintance with Nicolo Donati, a young boy with whom she fell in love on her last visit four years ago. She also is trying to solve the riddle left in a diary written by her dead mother, Sara. Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci." - imbd.com

Hmmm. Somehow that doesn't do a lot to inspire me to rush downstairs and add Sleeping Beauty to my must-see-right-away list. Surely it was a computer somewhere in Amazon's marketing department that made the selection ... even though it missed the mark by a Belton mile.

Why has Amazon gone to so much trouble to convince me I need something that I didn't know existed in the first place?

Wonder how many people will buy something today, simply based on a thinking box telling them People Like You Need Something Like This.

-Had breakfast yesterday morning with Chris White, who knows more about film and filmmaking than I do about ... well, about anything.

Chris made the point that our culture embraces the illusion that we have an almost infinite variety of "empowering" choices (as well as the right to make those choices), to the point we feel entitled to make choices independent of consequences and have little doubt that the importance of our choices supercedes the importance of anyone else's.

What's interesting is that 99% of Americans' choices are solely focused on What stuff do I want? ... whether it's a new Nissan or a Ford, an LCD or plasma TV, whether to go with Playstation or Nintendo, and whether to choose Nano over Shuffle.

We think we can choose what makes us "happy" ... and bought the idea, literally, that having material stuff is the key.

Seems to me we've chosen to become targets of a marketing ploy promising to make us feel smart, complete, in the know and in control of life at the center of the universe ... and all savy folks like us have to do is choose Brand X over Brand Y ... because that's what TV commercials say savy folks like us do.

And since we absolutely must define ourselves instantly and Have It Right Away we can even choose which of our uniquely personalized debt cards has the biggest available balance to Take That New Lifestyle Home Today!

Heck, we can even choose whether to skip this month's minimum payment and buy groceries instead, while we're standing in line with the rest of the herd waiting for the next available cashier.