The “Stuff Sells” Problem

I’ve been blogging on-and-of for a long time now, and I want to tell you about what I’ve learned about people from doing so.

This isn’t going to be based on comments I’ve received or other actual interaction-based feedback, but rather what I’ve learned about statistics and my interpretation of them. Because I think it’s telling me something about our society that I don’t think is a good thing.

The posts that generally do the best in terms of clicks, minus outside promotion on social media or what have you, are those where you’re reviewing an actual product.

“So what?” you might ask. “Everyone likes reviews of stuff, it helps them know what to buy!” And that’s absolutely true. The most effective reviews that people get are word-of-mouth reviews — and I see blog reviews as the next step up from that. You spend time on your blogs making a relationship between you and your readers, so it makes sense that they’d trust you in these matters.

But here’s where I think there could be a problem:

Is a product-review-heavy click count indicative that people aren’t looking to actually fix issues but rather buy their way out of them?

As those who have followed me here from my website Mudlife Crisis know, I’m very interested in natural movement and diet-based health fixes. I’ve done MovNat for years now, am an advocate for minimalist footwear and the proper transition to such footwear, and have carefully followed the ever-evolving ancestral living movement. I find much more satisfaction in removing things from and changing things in my life to fix my problems. And I have seen ample evidence that modern products and lifestyle are causing the problems with our health and happiness than any “humans are broken” arguments.

If I go to a specialist of some kind with a problem — say, sore knees — and they suggest different shoes or painkillers to “relieve” the problem, I am pretty unlikely to accept them as an answer to my problems. I would much rather find that specialist who tells me how to naturally fix the problem — movement patterns, exercises, and/or diet changes to end the problem without masking the symptoms.

But I am clearly in the minority here. Most people I know seem to think that we humans are broken and we need technology to fix or hide our problems. And they want that quick fix: they want to buy a new shoe that will keep them running marathons instead of fixing the way they run. They want a magic pill or product that will remove the pain they’re feeling instead of finding what is causing that pain and change that aspect of life.

Frankly, that’s the message we’ve been getting from marketing for decades, so it’s not surprising that this is the overwhelming attitude. When processed food manufacturers tell us that our increased obesity is due to lack of exercise and that we just need to “burn those calories” to stay healthy (and then the government does the same thing because saying otherwise would “take jobs away”), we accept it as fact. When we hear running shoe companies with big name sports celebrities as their spokesmen say that highly padded shoes are the answer to pain while running, we accept that as fact.

And when those product-based answers don’t work for us, we are told we’re not using the right product, or worse: that we’re too lazy and we’re broken because of genetics, which we can’t do anything about because it’s just the way we are!

One might ask me, then “Jamie, why’d you include those product reviews if that’s how you feel?” In all seriousness, I’ve done probably two or three product reviews in all the time I’ve run the website above, and the idea was to move people to more ancestral-living based answers. The products I reviewed were more about changing lifestyle than just covering up a greater problem.

What’s the answer here? Man, I don’t know. The answer could be honesty in product marketing, or government promotion of non-product based science to overcome the short-sightedness, or any host of other answers (probably not just one answer, either, which makes this much harder for people to accept).

But something’s gotta happen soon. Because we keep pumping out stuff that’s not making anything better and people keep getting worse off.