Raymond Klassen – Ideals and Identities

Quietly, contemporary life teaches us what to want.

It does not usually arrive as a command. It rarely feels like coercion. Most of the time, it feels like taste, preference, aspiration, personality, or instinct. A certain lifestyle begins to feel attractive. A certain image of success begins to feel natural. A certain kind of person seems admirable. A certain form of visibility begins to feel like significance.

By the time we notice the desire, it often already feels like ours.

This is why consumerism is no longer simply about buying things we do not need. That version of consumerism still exists, but it is no longer the deepest problem. The deeper issue is that entire perceptual environments now shape what appears desirable before we consciously reflect on it. We are not merely persuaded to purchase products. We are invited to imagine ourselves through repeatable forms of aspiration.

I have recognized this in myself.

Looking back, even my own cigarette habit emerged this way. I did not begin smoking because I carefully weighed evidence and concluded cigarettes were good for me. The desire formed much earlier within an atmosphere that made smoking feel emotionally charged long before I consciously reflected upon it. Cigarettes carried associations of adulthood, artistic seriousness, rebellion, masculinity, and composure. They belonged to certain films, musicians, conversations, and social environments that quietly shaped perception itself. By the time the habit became conscious, desire had already entered much deeper layers of imagination and attention.

What felt personal and spontaneous was also socially mediated in ways I barely understood at the time.

That is the difficulty with desire. We often experience it inwardly, but it rarely begins only within us. We learn desire socially. We learn what is worthy of attention by watching what others admire, pursue, display, and praise. We learn what kind of person seems enviable. We learn which gestures communicate depth, which possessions suggest success, which opinions signal intelligence, and which aesthetic choices make a life appear meaningful.

This does not mean desire is false. It means desire is formed.

Once we understand this, the question changes. We no longer ask only, “What do I want?” We also begin asking, “How did I learn to want this?” That second question is much more disruptive because it reveals that the architecture of desire is not always, or even mostly, built by reflection. It is often built by repetition, comparison, imitation, and atmosphere.

In a mass-mediated culture, this formation becomes more intense. Desire no longer travels only through families, friendships, local communities, or traditions. It now circulates through images, platforms, algorithms, profiles, brands, influencers, trends, and curated lifestyles. These are not neutral environments. They organize attention. They teach us what to notice and what to ignore. They create emotional associations before judgment has time to arrive.

The result is not simply that we buy more. It is that we increasingly encounter ourselves through images of lives we might perform.

This is where the avatar becomes important.

The avatar is not only a cartoon image, profile picture, or digital character. It is the reproducible version of ourselves that circulates socially apart from our embodied presence. It is the image of ourselves that can be edited, distributed, optimized, and measured. At first, this seems freeing. We can choose how to appear. We can curate our tone, our image, our interests, our convictions, even our vulnerability.

But over time a reversal can occur.

At first, the person curates the avatar. Eventually, the avatar begins curating the person.

We begin asking how an experience will appear before we have fully lived it. We begin sensing which emotions are legible and which are awkward. We begin arranging ourselves around what can circulate. The image becomes more than a representation. It becomes a quiet instruction.

This is not usually dishonesty. Most people remain sincere within these systems. That is precisely why the problem is so difficult to name. The danger is not that everyone is pretending. The danger is that sincerity itself can be shaped by systems of visibility, comparison, and reward. We may feel genuinely drawn toward a life that has already been organized for us by forces we barely understand.

Consumerism then moves inward. It no longer asks only that we purchase goods. It invites us to become consumable identities. A lifestyle becomes a brand. Political conviction becomes an aesthetic. Spiritual depth becomes a tone. Vulnerability becomes a recognizable style. Even authenticity can become a form of presentation.

This produces a strange exhaustion. A person can spend hours surrounded by images, stories, opinions, and performances, and afterward feel oddly dispersed. Nothing dramatic has happened. No obvious crisis has occurred. Yet attention has been scattered across endless comparisons and imagined versions of the self. One has been connected to everything except the actual texture of one’s own life.

The loss here is subtle. It is the loss of uncurated perception.

A person begins forgetting what it feels like to encounter reality without immediately filtering it through visibility, aspiration, anxiety, or comparison. Silence becomes difficult. Boredom becomes intolerable. Ordinary life begins to feel insufficient unless it can be translated into something shareable, admirable, or meaningful to others.

This is why the answer cannot simply be withdrawal from modern life. We cannot pretend that desire was ever entirely private or that culture has no right to shape us. Human beings have always learned desire from others. Culture itself depends on shared aspiration, imitation, inheritance, and memory.

The question is whether we still have practices that give us enough distance to notice how we are being shaped.

Silence helps. So does prayer, meditation, exercise, friendship, reading, art, conversation, and unstructured presence. These practices do not make us immune to social influence. They do something humbler and more necessary. They slow us down long enough to recognize that not every desire deserves obedience simply because it feels personal.

They create space between impulse and identity.

That space matters because authenticity cannot simply mean expressing whatever desire happens to arise within us. Desire itself has a history. It has been shaped by atmosphere, imitation, memory, media, and longing. To live authentically, then, is not to treat every desire as sacred. It is to become attentive enough to discern which desires deepen reality and which ones merely attach us to images of ourselves.

The task is not to escape modern life. It is to recover forms of presence that resist reduction.

We need encounters, practices, and relationships that remind us we are not avatars. We are embodied persons living in time, among others, within a fragile world that cannot be fully optimized or reproduced. The deepest things we need cannot be endlessly curated because they arrive through presence, patience, and relation.

The danger of consumerism is not only that we may want too much.

It is that we may learn to want ourselves falsely.

And perhaps the beginning of freedom is learning to notice the difference.