Have You Been Brandwashed?

So how many different brands do you have and/or regularly use in your home?

5? 10? 50?

Fact of the matter is: we cannot escape brands. In today's society they're literally everywhere and we need at least some of them in order to live a healthy and comfortable life. Which means it's not a matter of what or how many brands you buy and use - the real question is this: how do you decide between all the different options?

According to Martin Lindstrom, marketing guru turned consumer advocate and author of the book Brandwashed. Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy, the marketing industry knows exactly how to "help" us make that decision time and time again. Two of the worst strategies they employ are marketing to babies (even before they are born!) and inciting fear in the consumer.

Links of the Week XIII

I've been cut off from the internet for a while, but I'm back with a couple of nice links. Enjoy!

German:
Unfreiwilliges Whale-Watching: das war knapp!
Dabei wollte sie doch nur ein wenig malen! ;-)

English:
Four men, four roommates, four friends

What makes a face beautiful...

When I was twenty years old, I had the opportunity to work as a volunteer in Venezuela for one year. It was a great experience for a number of reasons: learning a new language, getting to know new people, immersing myself in a different culture and also learning a lot about myself.

One thing that intrigued me the most though, was how the Venezuelan beauty ideal differed from the one I was familiar with from my Central European background. Not only were the Venezuelan men attracted to women that were a bit chubbier on average, but skin color was an interesting issue. Almost all the girls I talked to admitted to envying the light complexion of my skin. Interestingly enough, where I come from we actually have solariums (aka tanning booths) to take care of the "problem" of our light complexion!

Now imagine my surprise when I read an article from the New York Times (which you can read here) that talks about a similar issue in China: women wearing face masks to the beach, so they won't lose the fair complexion of their skin - in their case, they want to keep the color of their skin, whereas Caucasians in Central Europe and Latinos in South America are not happy with the skin color God has given them! What a crazy world we live in...

All I can say is this: As an adult male, I have seen pretty female faces all over the world - because what makes a face beautiful is not its color. Let's just try to remember that...

Why Loneliness Is Worse Than Smoking

Everyone hates loneliness.

I'm not talking about being alone here. Every now and then we may choose to be alone - so we can think, reflect, ponder, pray, read or just enjoy the silence it brings. But nobody chooses to be lonely. Loneliness is that feeling of emptiness that overcomes you when you want to share something with somebody - an experience, an emotion - but nobody is there to share it with you...

Definitely bad for your emotional well-being, but as Daniel Goleman notes in his book Social Intelligence, the negative consequences go further than that:

"Making" The Ideal Partner

Chasing perfection.

We've probably all tried our hand at it at sometime or other: whether in the realm of sports, school, music, cooking, and the list could go on. There's something deep within us that longs to be able to play the perfect tennis match, score a perfect grade on that French test, sing with perfect pitch and cook the perfect meal in order to impress someone on a first date. Yet we fail miserably most of the time and realize once again that we live in a world where perfection just does not exist - we'll have to wait for the next world, the eternal one, to experience it fully.

Although we know this intellectually and are capable of applying it to all kinds of life situations, we tend to not want to accept it when it comes to finding the right partner - we want him/her to be perfect! (Disclaimer: I promise this will be the last post on relationships for a while ;-)) But as Daniel Goleman reminds us in his book Social Intelligence, that's just not going to happen:

Links of the Week XII

It was about time that I include a Piano Guys video in my links of the week. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. Also in this week's links: why people are like Swiss Army Knives, dogs on skateboards and some very interesting cars...

A Short Blog Manual

Hi guys, I've decided to make a short video, in which I explain some of the old and new features of the blog. Enjoy! (It might be best to watch it in full screen mode).

P.S. Sorry for the bad quality of the video and the regular clearing of my throat... I'm still an amateur at making these kinds of videos! ;-)