Advertising & Year 2080.

I am really impressed with all the marketing that is going on these days. They are glamourous, memorable, funny, and whatever similar adjectives you can add on.

On the other hand, the more I am impressed, the more I can understand why I am impressed, which eventually leads to my breaking-down of advertisements. After about two and a half years in learning how to "read" advertisements and its effects, I hope I have enough knowledge and understanding to write my own successful discourse analysis one day, and even learn more.

Just like most people in this wealth, satisifed world of North America, I have my own little problems, obstacles, and whatever else. I guess you can break it down into different aspects, such as social life, school life, spiritual life, health(?) life, and whatnot.

However, I am slowly realizing that despite the arbitrary borders and barriers we may put around these different areas of life, they are all complicatedly and intricately connected. In this sense, I can even go further and say that everything really comes down to one focal point, which is me as a whole, human being.

A Thinking, Feeling, Knowing, Questioning, Understanding, Seeing, Listening, Watching, Hearing, Breathing, Living creature.

It all comes back to who I am as a whole. Not as separate parts in which I must divide my spiritual, mental, psychological, physical, and emotional being towards various areas such as my friends, family, school, church, home, work, wherever.

It is such a simple concept, yet so difficult to grasp. Even as I am writing this, it is nearly impossible for me to say that I understand exactly what I am talking about. However, such a dichotomy is a...motivation.

I was just sitting in the back row on Friday, listening to the guest speaker, who is apparently famous in Britain. At one point, this one old lady, grasping what I assumed to be her grandchild of 16 years of age, walked slowly and sat down in front of me. I guessed her to be around 90 years old.

I don't really know why it got me started thinking about my future as a 90 year old man. But I did. And I thought bluntly, I wonder what it feels like to be this old, and have everyone, every SINGLE PERSON to whom I am close, dead.

No one will be alive to share my memories of my life.

The Saturday BBQs.

The crazy weekday nights studying at school with 3 other friends.

Ridiculously chasing after that girl in high school.

The summer retreats.

All the outdoor activites.

Moving from North Van to Kelowna.

Not even those types of memories, but everyday activites.

The car ride home from my friend's house.

Picking up my brother from work.

Getting on the skytrain to school.

Sharing a drink with my buddy.

Praying that I will pass that final exam.

Talking on MSN late at night.

Talking on the phone.

Having coffee with a friend.

Working out an hour and a half per day.

Even driving to GO workout.

All these little things. All these bigger memories. And I thought, at that moment, that what if there was no one in my life to whom I can recall these times?

I would see all the elementary school kids running around, the highschool teenagers trying to keep up with the trends, the motivated college students either partying or studying, the passionate young singles working in their early career life and having fun on the weekends, the newly weds with their 6-month old infants, the older married couples...

And no one would really care to ask, "how was your life, Simon?". Of course, they want to live their own lives, and create their own memories. Yet, I was just thinking, for that one moment, how would it make me feel if I was a lone elderly person still living in this world, with all my family and friends passed away?

It is an experience of which I may not necessairly want to be a part.