Valentine’s day is typically associated with chocolates, flowers, doves, and overpriced dinners. During this rather questionable holiday, love is shown through how much money one spends on gifts.
Throughout the years, and with societies general change in values, Valentine’s Day has become more of a spending contest rather than a day that celebrates genuine love.
From a marketing standpoint, the idea is quite simple. Find the most vulnerable human emotion, attach to it and associate it to a material object, and sell it.
This master marketer may have been onto something. Perhaps being are gullible towards things that they are not able to physically feel or control.
The concept of love, for example, cannot be defined or easily explained. Therefore, marketers influenced society to associate love with certain things, that in reality, have no correlation to love.
Although the concept of love may be real, the idea that flowers and chocolates symbolize loyalty and love is quite obscure.
Attaching a physical object with an indescribable and undefinable emotion is a way for large corporations to make a profit from human neglect and the inability to recognize that love does not have a price tag.
The concept of Valentine’s day is a brilliant way to trick people into thinking that in order to feel something, they must obtain something. No one really questions this norm either, it has just become part of mainstream culture. We see is portrayed all over our modern world, whether is be advertisements, celebrities or social media.
Society is set on this idea that things spark joy rather than human interaction, that the more we obtain, the happier we will be. Valentine’s Day is a clear-cut example of Americans falling victim to this.
Valentine’s day is filled with pressure for not only people who are not in a relationship, but also those who are.
Either way, one is either pressured to find a significant other, or pressured to spend as much money on the perfect gift.
This unnecessary stress is all mental caused by corporations and advertisements that use human emotions as a platform to increase their profit.