Competing with Coke.

Most people don’t have a world view, a philosophy with which they live their life. They are either following a template inherited from parents, or “coasting” or “going with the flow”, actively chosing what “feels good” or “feels better” between the choices they comes across passively. These are consumers.

Among these people there are people who want to feel good A LOT, they they make money the god, the religion and the philosophy. These money, fame, power hungry individuals come together to form corporations. They mitigate not just financial liabilities, but all moral moral qualms. The decision to ruin a reef, dicing attention spans, paying for child labor, it’s never yours…it’s the corporation’s. A forever handy rationalization. These are the producers.

Most producers, even the ones providing utility services dont just inform the consumer “hey, if you need to do X, then we have Y solution”, but rather encourage the consumers to consume by creating the need, fueling the desire. That’s advertising.

The profit driven amoral producer and the price sensitive apathetic consumer form a ravaging system which produces at any cost and consumes at any cost. Cost is health, clean air, clean water, trees, human rights, bird songs, time, the dollar a day worker in Bangladesh, the kid on the container ship to his new master, every damn thing we should have held dear. That’s status quo.

It can hardly be regulated. People regulating need money and majority to be regulators. Majority wants coca cola. Majority wants convenience. Majority wants money not for meeting needs or doing good, but to consume to fill a bottomless hole. Majority just wants to feel good, and the sad thing is that they are not even doing that. Trillions of dollars worth of stuff produced and consumed, supplemented by billions of dollars of pills to feel good, but we still don’t. That’s reality.

We don’t stop and think that this cycle of mindless consumption is not working. We try the bigger and better. We increase the pace of consumption. We don’t slow down. We don’t scale down. We don’t stop, and think to try a different route. That’s frustrating.

How do I pitch a “do good, even if unpleasant, and it will eventually feel good” to this instant gratification majority? How do I compete with coke?