Newswise — "Desire is a 'mimetic impulse' or an imitative proclivity," explains Fr. Mark Gruber, Ph.D., professor of anthropology at Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, Pa. "That is to say, what others have or enjoy mediates to us what we desire. We don't realize that it is a reflex of other people's possessions; we just feel that we have discovered our needs."
Consider your unsatisfaction at buying the 'perfect' gift for someone, only to see another shopper walk off with another " more perfect -- item. And you must suddenly have that.
And then there are all those commercials.
According to Gruber, because we are so unselfconscious about wanting what others have, desire is the most powerful impulse in us subject to manipulation. "Advertising experts are among the most anthropologically adept professionals because they understand the social nature of human desire better than psychologists."
You'd think that seeing all those options available would make us happier, but that's not the case.
"Seeing more and more people all around us possessing what we have not (as in advertising), is not the beholding of more and more choices for shopping pleasure," says Gruber. "Rather it is anxiety inducing because it releases an immoderate and bewildering feeling of neediness."
"We are not free so much to play the field of endless opportunities, as we are bound up by stronger urgencies to minimally acquit ourselves of the obligations to exhibit for myself some percentage of what I feel I must have just to be socially acceptable."
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