hypnotized

I was walking through a mall today and suddenly noticed the absurdity of what was going on around me (one layer of it at least). Thousands of us were passing through a building filled with objects created and displayed solely for the pleasure of the human eye.

Aside from visual features like colour and style, what difference is there between two identically sized shirts, let alone thousands of them? Why so much variety? Shop after shop of them, drawing our gazes, beckoning us towards them - to touch them, to adorn our bodies and spaces with them, to possess them and make them our own? What purpose do they each serve aside from pleasing the senses?

"Look how beautiful I am," they whisper from the windows."Have me and you can be more. More than you are, more than others are..."

This effect extends to living beings too. How easily we can be seduced by physical beauty in a person, whether by circumstance of bone protrusion, skin pigmentation or other incidental features of genetics. What do these have to do with the being we're looking at, with their nature or character? Nothing whatsoever. What we're responding to isn't the individual but the effect they're having on our senses and our thoughts. In some part of us stirs that same desire to possess. The hypnotic effect takes hold.

If you've had many beautiful things then you've likely experienced varying degrees of disappointment over the reality of possessing them - their tendency to fail to live up to the promising fantasies and instead to simply be what they are. Similarly if you've been physically attractive you may have come to notice after some time that, despite the social advantages and temporary pleasures it can initially provide, the reality of the experience tends to be as fleeting and empty as appearances themselves. Particularly since you're far more likely to attract the superficial - those who would seek to enhance themselves through possessing you.

So, what to do about it?

It might be enough to be aware. Noticing the tendency to seduce and be seduced by appearances, and the tendency in each of us to conjure fantasies of what could be were we to possess the beautiful. Keeping in mind that appearances are little more than a play of light - wonderful to see perhaps, yet insubstantial in themselves.