I have been so irritated by these ongoing series of London Drugs commercials that I feel I must say something. First, to get you all up to speed, one of the offending commercials:

To be fair to the actor, he’s posted this on his youtube site which is where I found it– Kudos to you, I know it’s a tough ol’ world out there for actors, you do a fine job.

It’s that sentiment of “We think so you don’t have to” that really cheeses my crackers.

This is an insidious, and ultimately dangerous belief, in my opinion. I pay money to people so that I don’t have to acquire knowledge. I don’t know how my computer or my car works. I need to hire a mechanic, a professional organizer, an IT guy, a personal trainer, a dog trainer. I don’t have to examine any beliefs because our party leader will tell me what to believe and how to vote. All because I’ve lost my sense of capability, of knowledge, of curiousity. It’s just too easy to feel that I don’t have time to learn, don’t have to learn, can pay someone to have that knowledge for me, and the worst of all–that’s too hard for me to learn.

Isn’t this the slippery slope into Wall-E world? The machines take over because we’ve taken our thinking out of the equation. We become receivers only. We are in real danger of having flabby brains.

And why as a corporation would you put it out there like that? We think you WANT to be stupid and inane, so we’re going to capitalize on that.

In one of the other versions of this commercial, we see a head filled with red liquid. As the head empties of the red liquid, we hear a bunch of tech talk about television screen resolution. Then a different but very friendly, dare I say, soothing voice intones:

We think so you don’t have to.

The head then fills up with blue liquid and the voiceover changes to trivia about television shows like Starsky and Hutch.

So, let me get this straight. I empty the life-blood of knowledge out of my head. I pay you money to have that knowledge and in return for ‘freeing’ all that space up, I can now fill up my head with the ice water of vacuous, unimportant information. The coolant of the brain. Really? That’s the message you’re going for? Wow. I guess sometimes there IS truth in advertising.

Meanwhile, we all get stupider, poorer, less capable, and have far less of a life than is there for us to have.

I’m resolved. I’m going to learn how to change the oil in my car, finally figure out how to replicate that  barley salad that I love, and use some power tools. I will figure out what a pixel is, and how I should prune my rosebushes. I am going to learn to play guitar and I am going to write that novel. And I will do it all despite the fact that I am unqualified, unsupervised, unfit, and a rank amateur. It will be better for me to do it badly then to pay someone else to do it.

Who’s with me? What are the things that you’ve given over to someone else that you’re going to take back.