I suppose in conjunction with the wanting to succeed sincerely, I of course enjoy attention and praise for my choices, but again, it’s so much more enjoyable when I thought of it all myself and bought it at Target than just plonking down a shitload of money because someone told me this was “in” and feeling like I’ve achieved something.

There are so many different facets to this and so many different motivations.

A small example.

For years I bought ‘responsible’ cars. You know, plain utilitarian vehicles that got me from point A to point B, often used and ugly. I was consciously rebelling against Madison Avenue. I did not want to participate in the game of buying a car that had a carefully constructed image created by the sellers ( but I was still creating and preserving a different image). The last car I bought I decided to dive in and buy a car that went to the opposite of what I had been doing, a flashy BMW Z4. My motives were pretty straightforward, I wanted the cheap, easy attention it would provide. I continue to be surprised at just how much and the type attention that a car can bring. People ooh and ah, heads turn, give me thumbs up, all from a car.

It’s fun to drive through the projects and see how many fancy cars there are, parked on the street next to subsidized housing. People respond to the way we appear. Our brains store judgements that we pull from when we encounter certain cues, and we’re all aware of this stuff, at least intuitively.

My feel is that being aware of the details, the when and why, may be more relevant than the image itself that we choose to project in any given moment?

Regarding cynicism, I had to read that a few times to really wrap my head around it, but that is at the root of the cynicism and that makes it sound good indeed!

Cynicism
a Greek philosophy of the 4th century B.C. advocating the doctrines that virtue is the only good, that the essence of virtue is self-control and individual freedom, and that surrender to any external influence is beneath the dignity of humanity.

And this is a bad thing?