We Are What We Watch. The influence a lifetime’s worth of… | by Joe Luca | Jul, 2023

The influence a lifetime’s worth of advertising has on the average person

Who am I? Where do I come from? How did I get here?

Without getting too existential, we ask ourselves these questions or ones like them because we want to know how we got to be the person we are now.

A simple enough answer might be … from a sexual encounter between a man and a woman. On a honeymoon, three years into an otherwise happy marriage or that summer night in the cabin in the woods that “we’ll always remember.”

Doesn’t matter, not really. It happened and now you’re here.

But what exactly does being here mean? What metrics do we use to define ourselves?

Genetics vs. culture vs. commercials

We can understand the color of our eyes, the white streak in our otherwise black hair, or the cleft in our chin. These are all genetic markers passed along from one generation to the next.

All these things account for how we look and to some degree how we act. The language we speak, the accent we got from living somewhere between Brooklyn and Queens.

No one questions the cultural influences of living in a community that’s mostly Catholic or Muslim, mostly Italian or Jamaican.

We’re expected to take on the traits, styles, and fashion sense of those that live around us. We are influenced by who we count as friends, mentors, or professionals (teachers, coaches) that we trust.

But what about how we think or what we think? What informs the views we take, the choices we make, and the myriad things we believe in? We see nothing wrong with a two-year-old running around answering our questions with Meep-Meep! because he believes he’s the Road Runner? So, is it fair to say we are who we are because of all that has gone on around us?

That we like to dance because Mom and Dad played their Big Band LPs and danced in the living room, with you following behind them, or that doing the Moonwalk for friends and family is just something that happened after watching Michael Jackson do it on MTV.