COMMENTARY: The Latest Miserable Trend

c. 2000 Religion News Service (Dale Hanson Bourke is publisher of RNS.) UNDATED _ Just remember, you heard it here first. When you and your friends are chatting about how pink is”out”and green is”in,”when you are talking about being tired of Jennifer Lopez and platform shoes, when everyone is trying to prove how”with it”they are, […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Dale Hanson Bourke is publisher of RNS.)

UNDATED _ Just remember, you heard it here first. When you and your friends are chatting about how pink is”out”and green is”in,”when you are talking about being tired of Jennifer Lopez and platform shoes, when everyone is trying to prove how”with it”they are, you can be the one with the ultimate trend.


Pain and suffering are in. Really. My source is impeccable, the research complete.

According to American Demographics magazine, the latest way to show how very with it you are is to willingly subject yourself to misery. There it is in the January issue, page 60. See it for yourself.

So if you want to be cooler than all your friends, if you want to be the subject of envious whispers in the office, if you want to be as au courant as you can be, go out and get busy suffering.

This may not be as easy as it sounds. In a society fraught with luxury and comfort, where marketers struggle to find new words for wretched excess and where such items as $500 Pashmina shawls go from rare to common in a season, discomfort is darn tough to find.

According to the magazine article,”By definition, the highest status belongs to those things which are most scarce, and nothing is more rare among the richest members of the richest society on Earth than hardship.”Imagine that.

Of course, not just any kind of suffering will do. Preferably you will pay big bucks to be miserable. That’s why the really prestigious travel tours sound like the very worst camp-out you ever took when you were a Boy or Girl Scout. One includes the following disclaimer:”At times you may find yourself frightened, cold, hungry and uncomfortable.”All that for the cost of a small house.

Being an astute marketer, I figure it’s time for churches and mission groups to cash in. Instead of asking for a few bucks, they should go all out with an audacious request. Let’s say $20,000 buys you a slightly miserable visit to see missionaries working in one of the poorest countries in the world.

For $50,000 individuals can be up close and personal at the site of a complex humanitarian emergency. No safe drinking water. No place to sleep but on the cold, hard ground. Why, you might even pick up malaria or hepatitis if you’re lucky. Imagine how jealous your friends would be.

Of course, the problem with this kind of suffering is that you might notice the other people who haven’t even paid to be miserable. You might see just how common pain is in the world. You might even get distracted by all those pesky people who don’t understand suffering is supposed to be a trend, not a way of life.


But that’s when the really good marketers have to be called in. They have to make sure that pain and suffering just appear to be commonplace. They have to convince American consumers that the rest of the world is just lagging behind because they lack taste and true style. They have to remind us that we deserve to have so much because we’re, well, special.

Because without that, how could we actually get so caught up in pursuit of pleasure that we would think pain is something to be envied? How could we possibly get our values so perverted that while the vast majority of the world suffers in earnest, we dabble in misery because we think it’s trendy?

DEA END BOURKE

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