The Commercialism of Stress and Christmas

Submitted by tonyplant on December 12, 2006 - 13:04.

Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism offers a surprisingly funny and informative website about stress. Stress, Inc. : the commerce of coping is a lot of fun. There is a comprehensive  history of stress with games and animations. There is an exploration of the commercialisation of stress by pharmaceutical companies, by the fitness industry, and by an astonishing array of other businesses. One particularly fine example details how advertising creates our neuroticism about aspects of life and then offers a solution to assuage those fears and stresses:

Calgon's now-legendary "Calgon...take me away" campaign tapped into anxiety --
stemming from situations such as having dirty dishes, which represented life's mundane stressors. In the television ad, dirty dishes, portrayed as a source of "social disapproval" among one's peers, created intolerable stress for one woman... bathing with Calgon bath gel provided a release from the anxiety. ...(T)he product provided a possible solution to the problem. "The product relieves the stress." That's the key to a successful fear appeal.

The Times is offering a Quiz: testing for festive stress. The quiz has the explanatory preamble:

Christmas has the potential to be one of the most stressful events in the calendar. According toa recent survey, the average preparation time is 13 full days. This involves 288 hours of shopping, four hours wrapping parcels, three hours decorating the house, nine hours cooking and 11 hours cleaning up the mess. And then there’s the sums of money you feel you have to spend. But whether you are time-rich and cash-poor or cash-rich and time-poor, there are ways of minimising the pain with good management.

I'll just make the obvious point that this is a description of a holiday but it sounds more like something that should have appeared on the list of the 12 Labours of Hercules. I am mindful that I had my own complaint about the social and family tensions of Christmas recently but this is amounting to a collective hysteria.

I feel that I should say something profound about how we became aware of our own mortality and then developed belief systems to reinforce those fears and aggravate them and then attempted to use those same systems to assuage them. It is odd that a religious festival of pagan origins with a christian overlay has retained the souped up celebration and over-indulgence but acquired more, not less, guilt. However, I am definitely not up to it: possibly I need more Calgon for my washing machine.

PS, Shinga gave me permission to reproduce her image: click on it to see the detail on Flickr.

Copyright 2006, Tony Plant Happystance Project

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