Never before have children been marketed to more aggressively than they are now. Never before have parents allowed marketers so many direct routes of access to their kids – social media, TV, the internet, even schools and extracurricular activities. We are increasingly unwilling to pay for content, so advertisers are stepping up to foot the bill – and in return, we allow them to turn our kids into consumers. As an environmentalist, this maddens me. As a parent, it breaks my heart. I don’t like the idea of multimillion dollar advertising campaigns aimed at manipulating her desires. I don’t like companies using cartoon characters to sell unhealthy food, or trotting out tired gender tropes to sell toys. I especially don’t like not being able to go a single day without the advertising world teaching children to want things so deeply that they fall, spaghetti-legged, to the floor in full-on tantrums when these things are denied. - Madeliene Sommerville, Journalist
Employment means being, generically, in work. But misemployment means being in work but of a kind that fails to tackle with any real sincerity the true needs of other people: merely exciting them to unsatisfactory desires and pleasures instead. The way Primark, Patek Philippe and youporn.com might. A man employed by the casino chain Las Vegas Sands to hand out flyers to tourists so as to entice them to use slot machines is clearly ‘employed’ in the technical sense. He’s marked as being off the unemployment registers. He is receiving a wage in return for helping to solve some (small) puzzle of the human condition of interest to his employers: that not enough tourists might otherwise leave the blue skies and cheerful bustle of a south Nevada city’s main street to enter the dark air-conditioned halls of an Egyptian-themed casino lined with ranks of ringing consoles. The man is indeed employed, but in truth, he belongs to a large subsection of those in work we might term the ‘misemployed’. His labour is generating capital, but it is making no contribution to human welfare and flourishing. He is joined in the misemployment ranks by people who make cigarettes, addictive but sterile television shows, badly designed condos, ill-fitting and shoddy clothes, deceptive advertisements, artery-clogging biscuits and highly-sugared drinks (however delicious). The rate of misemployment in the economy might be very high. And while we may be genuinely grateful for a job and give our best to do it well, at the back of our minds we do - as employees - nurture the hope that our work contributes in some real way to the common good; that we are making, modestly, a difference. - The School of Life
Some moments swing into your life like a giant hand to slap you, and afterwards you’re left stinging but ten times more awake. My four days in Calais last week was one of those. I haven’t even come close to sorting the thoughts in my head, but there are some looming larger than the others: People prefer to get their opinions from FaceBook and the daily headlines than by looking at the situation on their doorstep, or talking to the human beings who are living it. Fear stands us a hair’s breadth from hideous bigotry, however kind we thought we were. In the meantime, I can only ask that you find out more about what is happening in Calais at the moment, and why. Hopefully it will lead you to seek to understand more about the whole messy, unjust state of the world, as it has me. - Dizraeli - Musician
- Alain de Botton, Philosopher