Thomas A. Shakely

How much does it cost to be CJ?  Not Pamela Anderson– CJ.  So, not how much are  implants, a nose job and a personal trainer; but how much are CJ’s nail appointments, and hair? How much does her (or any of the characters’) makeup cost? The car lease? Her CD player and apartment in Malibu?  The sofas? CJ and the gals never wear the same clothes in two shows.  Never the same shoes. How much does that cost? They don’t shop at Sears, right? …

Baywatch, along with Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place, is changing America in ways you don’t notice– precisely because you don’t notice. In prior TV and movies any incongruous displays of wealth had an explanation, however cliched.  Magnum PI lived off the kindness of Higgins.  Rachel on Friends has rich parents.  But with rare exceptions, the characters in the new crop of 20 something TV have access to material goods way outside their pay range, but they are made so ordinary you never think to question it.  We know very well how Pamela Anderson affords it.  But it’s made axiomatic that CJ can.

It’s wrong to look at the Baywatch women as pornography, especially during a time when actual pornography is becoming so easy to acquire.  The real pornography is the surrounding materialism, the casual display of impossible lifestyles and unattainable goods as if they are ordinary commodities.  After ten hours of porn, a breast flash doesn’t seem like a big deal.  After ten hours of Baywatch, leasing a car doesn’t, either.

The preceding is from a 1995 article on The Last Psychiatrist entitled “This Is Baywatch”. The cognitive dissonance created by much of media today is baffling. When I read the above article, an example that came to mind was from “Night Stalker“, a short-lived program on ABC in 2005.

The lead, Stuart Townsend, plays L.A. crime reporter Carl Kolchak. A still frame from the opening credit sequence is below. It’s Carl Kolchak working from his home in the Hollywood Hills.

Can you spot the problem? The median sales price for a home in the Hollywood Hills is just under $1 million. The median salary for a reporter in Los Angeles is roughly $90,000/year.

Ramit Sethi has written about subtle barriers in place to combating the subtle psychological barriers to meeting reality when it comes to losing weight. He derides the, “Ugh, why don’t fat people just eat less?” complaint:

Former FDA commissioner David Kessler has written a terrific book describing how food companies systematically engineer foods to overeaten (including designing foods that can be swallowed quicker so we can consumer more and more in one sitting). These are tested, refined, and optimized processes, not mere accidents.

Most importantly, behavioral change is not simply about trying harder.

As regards both the psychological impact of Baywatch in impacting consumerism beyond one’s means while simultaneously neutralizing thought about overspending, and to Ramit’s point about engineered fattiness in popular foods, I see a strong case for willfully withdrawing from popular media in some or all areas of life.

From Jonah Lehrer:

I’m pretty fascinated by this chart from the McKinsey Quarterly, which is a great demonstration of the optimism bias. The chart captures the earnings estimates of equity analysts for S&P 500 companies. The downward slope of these yellow lines is what happens when our hopeful projections meet dismal reality:

Unfortunately, all that data is no match for a deep-seated bias, which leads us to accentuate the positive and downplay the prospect of potential losses. (This helps explain why earnings projections are even less accurate during economic downturns.)

The graph above is beautiful in how it illustrates the problem of rose colored glasses in business. One commenter suggested: “This has nothing to do with optimism. Equity analysts are just cheerleaders for the companies they cover, so that their banks can get investment banking business. If the analysts started becoming pessimists, the banks would get no deals.”

Related to optimism bias in my mind is the notion that you would do better to invest “smarter” than to do so conservatively or realistically.

Ramit Sethi has written on this, discussing mutual funds v. index funds (active management, high fees, but sexy, v. automated management, low fees, but boring). As with the downward slope of earnings estimates, Ramit points out the insane fact that some 85 percent of mutual funds fail to beat the market!

Yet more people will invest in mutual funds than index funds this year because they believe, unrealistically, that they can find the “right” manager or the “right” funds, rather than trust an indexing process that delivers consistent returns.

Have you heard of The Haka? It’s an ancient traditional dance in New Zealand. A variant of it practiced by the All Blacks Rugby Union became controversial a few years ago for its alleged psychological impact.

From Wikipedia:

Haka may be understood as a kind of symphony in which the different parts of the body represent many instruments. The hands, arms, legs, feet, voice, eyes, tongue and the body as a whole combine to express courage, annoyance, joy or other feelings relevant to the purpose of the occasion.

The type of dance performed by the rugby players was a war dance:

It’s easy to understand why some might find it controversial psychologically, but isn’t that part of what games are about?

The Haka as performed by the All Blacks Union makes the NFL and its pregame show look utterly milquetoast in comparsion.

From Kevin Hartnett at The Millions: “Reading War and Peace: The Effects of Great Art on an Ordinary Life:”

In the same way that it would be hard to meet Scarlett Johansson and not be distracted by her beauty, it is difficult to read War and Peace and not be preoccupied with its reputation as the greatest novel ever written. …

One way to think about what a work of art does is to imagine the counterfactual—how would my life have been different had I not spent the last three months reading War and Peace?  The answers, I think, tend to group into three categories: The social experiences I had because of the book; the ideas the book incorporated into my life; and the aesthetic moments that were opened to me because of what I was reading. …

Tolstoy’s intellectual agenda in the book was to expose the meagerness of historical accounts of the War of 1812 that tried to reduce the world-remaking conflict to a finite and knowable set of causes.  Instead, Tolstoy wanted to depict the war in all its complexity and contingency, to show that the outcome rested at least as much on the decision of an individual soldier to charge or not as it did on Napoleon’s machinations, and that both the soldiers and the Emperor were controlled equally by forces larger than themselves. …

(One somewhat disquieting effect of reading War and Peace is that the more your own thoughts show up in its pages, the less original your life begins to feel.) …

The night I finished reading about Borodino, it was plainly obvious that I had just read something great.  Yet here I was sitting in a corner of my couch, just the same as I had been an hour before.  I thought about the question with which I opened—what is it that greatness does? An encounter with greatness, I would say, is like a bright light fixed in time, a marker that defines memory and makes it clearer than it otherwise might have been, that we were here.

Hartnett gives voice to the power of great literature to combat our natural tendency toward narcissism and egoism. It speaks to one of the benefits of greatness: humility.

When Sens. McCain and Obama were speaking on the campaign trail in 2008 of “serving a cause greater than yourself” they were attempting to speak to our desire to be great personally (although in their minds, that greatness was something to be achieve mainly by voting for them.)

I’m convinced that one of the principle sources of insecurity and inhumanity in how so many approach living arises from a failure to read, to immerse oneself in the mysterious power that the written word has on the growth in scope, breadth and depth of the human mind.

The more we learn, the more we learn how much is left to learn.

Roy Williams, author of The Wizard of Ads, writes the Monday Morning Memo, a (free) weekly e-mail newsletter that’s a must-read if you want master advice on advertising, marketing, and the psychology and execution that will help a business skyrocket to success.

In a recent memo, he praises one of Old Spice’s latest commercials, “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like:”

Much has been made of the new TV ad from Old Spice, “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like.” Yes, its seamless one-shot videography and old-school stage effects are impressive and I’m certain the oyster in his hand is supposed to trigger unconscious sexual appetite, especially when its location is invaded by a massive, Old Spice cylinder that rises slowly upward.

But these are not the things that captivate us. Impressive special effects and hidden sexual triggers are everywhere, no big deal.

…

The magic of the Old Spice script is hidden in plain sight; imperative voice is the sound of command: “Look at your man. Now back to me.” Swim to Kansas. Walk your dog. Kick a can. Lead the imagination. Don’t be ignored. Write imperative voice.

Do it. Open with a 3-word sentence. Make the first word a verb. Prepare to be amazed. Imperative voice gets attention.

Get Roy’s e-mails.