People will say they aren’t religious, and then be wholly committed to some lifestyle/self-help cult that takes more time, money and effort than attending any kind of religious service once a week ever will.
It’s just. Interesting. How lifestyle, fashion and self-development are specifically marketed as the Solution to your worries and troubles and search for meaning, perfectly designed to fill the niche left behind by organised religion in increasingly secularised Western societies.
And this is why it’s so important for brands to build a Story around their products. Because they’re not just selling you an item with material utility. They are hoping to sell you an identity. They are trying to imbue ultimately meaningless things with a sense of deeper meaning, because the marketing isn’t really speaking to our rational side which tells us which things we need to perform our everyday tasks. It is speaking to our emotional side, our dreams and ambitions, our desire to make sense of the world and our place in it.
You see this a lot with marketing of literature too. The publishers aren’t content with selling you books. They want you to buy into an identity as a reader, as a bookworm, as a nerd. They talk about the smell of new books and the guilty pleasure compulsive buying of too many books and the pros and cons of paperbacks versus hardcovers and the “things only a book nerd will understand”. And not to harp on about BookTok and Bookstagram, but these two communities play right into that, by being concerned with Reader Identity and the asthetics and lifestyle of consuming stories, rather than literature as a tool for sharing human experience and knowledge and broadening your horizons and an at times subversive art form.
I think nothing is more emblematic of the above than book bloggers reviewing the Communist Manifesto on Amazon-owned Goodreads
