Broken Dreams

Our wish for freedom, mobility, opportunity as well as our search for happiness define what we consume from cars to musli and ebooks.

But almost more importantly, they define the well-tuned marketing machinery that fuels our consumption habits. Because virtually anything can be marketed as ticking at least one or two of the boxes.

A car may promise freedom and mobility in one ad and maybe opportunity and happiness in another. And the same is true for most things ranging from soft drinks to life insurances.

Most successful of all, smart phones have quickly become our new best friends because they seemingly tick all the boxes. After all what could be more perfect than a gadget that gives you instant access to virtually unlimited information, entertainment, and people?

Like children in a pink cotton candy world, we are living out our sweetest dreams with the one difference being that we usually pay for them.

But what happens, when they brake, because they usually do. What do we do when the pictures from our Blackberry don’t load onto the iMac, what if the slide show we spent hours on froze and folded? What if that brand new car has a clunky gear shift, or the five star dishwasher is slow? What if the dream we bought doesn’t work?

Usually at that point the nightmare starts. We spend endless hours searching for warranties in old cardboard boxes and browse through endless online chats and waste many agonizing minute explaining in detail the truly frustrating experience to a blatantly indifferent Bangladeshi.

In the end, more often than not, we end up putting more money down to purchase the new and improved version, the upgraded dream, and hope that this time surely it will last....