The Market Gives You Feelings Of Guilt – This Is How It Works

Mankind has had to deal with challenges that have become increasingly sophisticated. Development is taking place at a frantic pace and our biology has simply not managed to keep pace. Our bodies, which were once designed to hunt and protect us in harsh conditions, today face technical challenges. One of them is how the market gives you feelings of guilt.

In the book El enemigo conoce el sistema ( over: “The enemy understands the system” ), the author Marta Peirano does a good job of explaining how it works. In this, the author describes how others’ knowledge of how your way of thinking works makes you vulnerable. Companies take advantage of this vulnerability to make you consume more.

The market gives you feelings of guilt

Researchers now know, for example, that happy music makes you buy things faster. Calm music encourages you to stay in one place for a long time. What music do you hear in the department stores? What kind of music plays in the background in a store that sells more expensive items? Coming home and realizing how much unnecessary stuff you have shopped can often be outrageous. Thus, the market can definitely give you feelings of guilt.

Maybe you also feel guilty about not being able to stop eating junk food? It probably happens to you often: you have decided to improve your diet, but fail. In fact, this is a created and anticipated effect.

In Peirano’s words: “ It is easier for us to believe that we are pigs without an ounce of discipline, than to believe that one of the most powerful and toxic industries on the planet has employees who are extremely motivated geniuses with unreasonable wages, and laboratories with the latest technology , whose sole purpose is to manipulate us without our being aware of it. ”

In other words, many people and a lot of technology are working to break down your willpower. Have you ever stopped to think about what power you are dealing with?

How has the market been designed to give you feelings of guilt?

You are facing a market that sells cheap, unsatisfactory foods with low nutritional value. This creates a paradox. Nowadays, many people are overweight and malnourished at the same time. This is because the quantity of our foods has nothing to do with their quality.

The market is created so that we as consumers will run out of time and make impulsive decisions, with too little knowledge and too many things to deal with at the same time. At the same time, many older recipes have started to come back and are presented as healthy today, as an effect of us starting to worry more about what we put in us.

Many food packaging shows people exercising and a text advertising what the product does not contain. What we may forget is to check what it actually contains .

Some products today contain less sugar. However, this has led to a decrease in sales of these. As Peirano says: “ It is easier to create an addiction than to get rid of one. ”

This is definitely a vicious circle we are entering into at an early age. Breakfast cereals that are marketed to children, for example, often contain addictive and unhealthy ingredients, even though many people believe that these cereals are “useful”.

Consumption online

In one way or another, the purpose of the market is to ensure that you do not stop consuming. What is popular today? A good example is online streaming platforms with lots of programs and movies you can watch.

TV channels have been replaced by platforms that provide us with episode after episode of programs without commercial breaks, as desired and at a “modest price”.

If the market does not give you feelings of guilt, then what feelings are the ones that dominate after you have spent an entire afternoon in front of the TV, even though you have a long list of other things to do? Social media acts as the icing on the cake. How many times have you picked up your mobile to do something important, but instead found yourself scrolling page up and page down?

Social media is highly addictive. Websites that can be scrolled down endlessly – designed based on your previous choices with things that appeal to you – are specially designed to keep you at the screen. For example, you can go to your Facebook page and just browse, browse and browse. The lyrics, movies, pictures and comments from people you know never end. In order to log out, you must first regain control of your attention.

This is difficult to succeed because those who designed these platforms have created them for this very purpose. They want you to stay in their virtual environments for as long as possible. These are people who have all the knowledge they need to know how your brain works. Unfortunately, this is incredibly easy to use.

Feelings of guilt and desperation go hand in hand

So it is in this way that the market gives you feelings of guilt. Great guilt. Maybe you eat ice cream when you feel guilty. When you feel a measure of desperation, this is often the result of guilt. In reality, just like on film, this desperation can make you eat ice cream in front of the TV, something that, of course, leads to more guilt.