How do we find meaning in life? We find meaning by conceiving a story out of the building blocks that we see around us and by measuring that story against our picture of “the good life”. That formulated story is fed by images that we presently perceive and images that we do not immediately perceive except through memory. Where is this picture of the good life formulated? It is formulated in and by the imagination. This process infiltrates all areas of our lives. For example, my synthesis of advertisements takes place in the imagination and, therefore, naturally places me in relation to the thing advertised. Whatever it might be, whether cell phone or new car, I imagine my life—if only for a moment—with that object. The power of those images is undeniable. They are surrounded by the colors and sounds of my life and set directly in the narrative path. I quickly and perhaps unthinkingly reconstruct my story around the attainment of that object and I deftly defend the cost accordingly.
Because we are searching for a purposeful story and because it has largely eluded us, we perpetually ask questions, often subconsciously, like “So what? What’s in it for me?” Those in the advertising industry are highly attuned to this reality. They know that every effective advertisement will provide an answer to this question with promises that are actually impossible to fulfill.
According to commercials, beer is no longer simply a beverage and technology is no longer simply a time saver. Now, beer is a magnet that attracts happy and beautiful people into our lives. Technology now serves as a social networking tool that will, like beer, attract happy and beautiful people into our lives. Both will apparently banish the loneliness and unhappiness.
A Superbowl commercial for Monster.com. Various kids—pudgy, short, dynamic, eccentric, skinny—speak to the camera, some with vigor, some with bland expressions of opaque hopelessness.
“When I grow up,” says the first kid, “I want to file all day long.”
“I want to climb my way up to middle management!”
Cue the background choir music.
“…Be replaced on a whim.”
“I want to have a brown nose.”
“I want to be a yes man…”
“A yes woman!”
“Yes, sir, coming, sir.”
“Anything for a raise, sir.”
“When I grow up…”
“Grow up…”
“I want to be under-appreciated.”
“Be paid less for doing the same job.”
“I want to be forced into early retirement.”
Cue the tag line: “What do you want to be?”
Monster.com’s current motto? “There’s a better job out there.”
In thirty seconds or less, this advertisement for a career matchmaker resonates with the incredibly common desire we share for change. With change, we assume, will come more personal happiness. It taps immediately into our collective longing to be something more. What do you want to be? Well, I don’t want to be doing this meaningless job forever. By making the spoken dreams of the children ridiculous and yet eerily similar to the day-to-day mutterings of our heart, the advertisers convince us that being under-appreciated or being obedient or being middle-management is simply not good enough—not worth valuing.
How is the ad industry so effective in selling its imaginative message? How has it significantly defined, even for those of us who are wary, what life is all about and who we are? Advertisers have not made all these promises conceptually, in propositions; instead, they have presented a picture to us. They have appealed directly to the interpreting and storying faculty of the mind: the imagination. Our interpretations and the subsequent story we construct is grounded in our deepest desires. Advertisers do not appeal to reason per se; they appeal primarily to our desires because, as St. Augustine said, we are fundamentally desiring beings. What we tend to desire most is “the good life,” which we consciously or unconsciously call happiness or meaning.
So, what will make us happy and what will give us meaning? Whoever has the power to answer those questions, whoever has the power to define the good life, will not only control culture but will sway the masses. As things currently stand, that power usually lies in the hands of the advertising agency and the music industry. How do they define the good life? They define it as the gratification of pleasure and they do so quite tantalizingly with images that draw us into their descriptive definition.
Advertisers have effectively redefined both “good” and “life” by presenting to our imaginations a picture of the possible. They know that we are constantly—every minute of every day—synthesizing events in a hunt for the possibility of the good life. We are longing and looking, always looking, for what will provide happiness and meaning.
Imagine this:
I spent my teen years on a river so small that there was some debate amongst the boys as to whether it should be called a creek or a river. It was a moody tributary, lofty and high spirited during the Spring melt off but crestfallen, mumbling, and melancholy during the late Summer. Much of the Summer was spent wandering up and down the river with a fishing pole and a stringer looped over my shoulder. My mother was frustrated by all the tinfoil wrapped trout clogging her freezer. She understood that my soul was soothed by the gurgling and giggling of the water around my legs and the distant sighing of the cotton wood trees, but she didn’t like the results. I don’t blame her, but nothing made me happier than the sudden grab and fight of a trout at the end of my line.
In the early mornings, as the mist sagged and brooded over the waters, I often saw the graceful deer or the rotund raccoon in the back yard. The deer always struck me as stately creatures, fluid and agile, and I was inspired by the ease with which they hurdled the high fences. Raccoons, on the other hand, amazed me with their waddle and stealth. They appeared out of nowhere, slipping in and out of the mist. They stooped beneath large packs, masked offenders of a bygone era who refused to outgrow their secret identity. They skirted the bank of the river and forded the waters like derelicts: furtive, quick-tempered, and lonely.
Perhaps inspired by Where the Red Fern Grows, a favorite by Wilson Rawls, I entertained the idea of catching a raccoon on my own. I talked it over with Dad one evening.
“I’m thinking of catching one of those raccoons, Dad,” I said. I thought about calling it a coon, just to see how authentically wonderful it felt rolling off the tongue, but I thought better of it.
“Really? How do you plan on doing that?” he asked.
“Just like Billy does in the book,” I said.
“You don’t have any coonhounds, son,” replied my Dad with all the sensitivity of a scientist. I glanced at our cocker spaniel who slept by the door. We named her Little Ann after one of the greatest dogs in literature, subconsciously hoping that she would live up to that high title. No such luck. We loved her, but she never treed a coon and dad’s comment goaded my discontent.
“I don’t need a coonhound. I just need to set a trap.”
Dad nodded and so I continued, trying to recapture what I had read in Where the Red Fern Grows. “I’ll find a strong log and drill a hole in it about six inches deep. I’ll drop a piece of shiny tin in the bottom and lay it flat so that it catches the sun and draws the raccoon’s attention. Then I’ll drive some nails at an angle into the log so that they stick downward into the drilled hole. Each nail point will have another nail point opposite it in the log, see. That will leave enough room for the raccoon’s paw to enter, of course, but it won’t be able to pull out.”
“Why not?” asked my brother.
“Because when the raccoon balls up its paw into a fist around the tin, his fist won’t fit back through between the nails.”
“He could just let go and slide back out,” suggested my brother.
“That’s true,” said Dad, “but he won’t let it go. He’s a greedy little bugger.”
I reminded my brother of what we’d learned in the book: raccoons are the preeminent thieves of shiny trash. They are junk collectors whose eye is easily taken by the flash of something bright and pretty. No matter how painful the trap or how imminent the danger, the raccoon will not let go of his prize.
“Sounds like you’ve got it all figured out,” said my Dad. “What will you do when you’ve got him trapped? How do you plan on bagging him?”
This was rain on my parade. I hadn’t thought through the plan to the very end. I had no gun. I did have a fish bonker. Maybe I could club him to death. But then I remembered the fury of the trapped raccoon described in the book. I remembered the slashing claws and the bared teeth.
A whirling dervish with enormous claws and a black mask haunted my dreams. It thrashed my mind all that night: reason enough for not following through on building the trap. My idea of building a coon trap never actualized, but I remembered the coon and his silly stooping tendencies whenever I was tempted to spend my hard-earned money on a new tape cassette. Why I have boxes of tape cassettes piled in the basement is difficult for me to explain without losing my dignity. Why I’m willing to pay a thousand dollars for something that will end up on the scrap heap in three years is likewise difficult to explain.
Here we are stranded in a spiritual wasteland and brazenly snatching at whatever shiny objects catch the eye. Like raccoons, we skirt the neighbors and ford the spiritual shallows like derelicts: furtive, quick-tempered, and lonely. We have sold our souls for nothing and garnered our lives with tin. God’s question to his people in Isaiah 55:2 is the same question he asks of us: “Why do you spend money for what is not bread, and your wages for what does not satisfy?” Our answers, if we offer any, are hardly satisfactory. We know something’s wrong. We know, deep down, that something needs to change, but we keep stuffing our mouths with air and wiping the tears prompted by hunger.
Even from a very young age, we observe various sources of happiness—the cookie jar, mom’s lap, the sandbox—and pursue them. Even children imagine the happiness they will find if only they can reach the cookie jar. That formative power to envision ourselves in the good life only magnifies with age. Instead of the sandbox, we envision Maui. Instead of the cookie jar, we envision a fat bank account full of cash and then we act to bring those imaginings into reality.
It is fair to say, then, that how we live is based on desires conceived in the imagination. And if our current imaginations are myopic, then we are in bigger trouble than we know. Like Jill and her traveling companions, we scramble angrily over the very objects that God wants us to see. For all our huffing and puffing, we cannot see what God has given us to see.
We have forgotten what Aslan said at the outset: “Whatever strange things may happen to you, let nothing turn your mind from following the signs…Here on the mountain I have spoken to you clearly; I will not often do so down in Narnia. Here on the mountain, the air is clear and your mind is clear; as you drop down into Narnia, the air will thicken. Take great care that it does not confuse your mind.”
But we are confused. The Holy Spirit is not in our eyes1 and we have wide-spread rupture. What we are looking for is wholeness: the abundant life. Christ came to give life and to give life abundantly (John 10:10), so it must be possible to have. Christ made it clear in Matthew 13 that we refuse to turn and be healed by him because we cannot see. What we need is transformation, and meaningful life transformation only happens by way of spiritual eye surgery. If so, we should take great pains to keep the imaginative eye, the spiritual eye, healthy.
Sophocles has been credited with saying that “a wise doctor does not mutter incantations over a sore that needs the knife.” Let’s stop the insane muttering. Let’s go under the knife.
