27. Cancel Your Magazine Subscriptions

I have a friend who reads dozens of consumer magazines each month. She has an exciting and satisfying career, lives in a beautiful home, has two lovely and talented daughters, and they’re all healthy. She has all these and many other reasons to be ecstatic. Yet she recently went through an extended period when she was consumed with the idea that she wasn’t happy, and that her life just wasn’t what it should be.

One day I happened to be looking through the stack of magazines on her desk. All of a sudden it hit me: One of the reasons she thought she was so unhappy was she was gauging her life by the unrealistic life-styles portrayed in these magazines.

Most consumer magazines are little more than vehicles for Madison Avenue. One of their primary purposes is to get us to buy the products they advertise. Month after month, year after year, they create expectations about our lives we’re often not even aware of.

Indeed, with the possible exception of television, there are few places where the idea of unbridled consumption is more subliminal and more seductive than the advertising found in these magazines. Advertisers are now spending billions of dollars each year in print advertising. It’s not surprising that, through the lure of page after page of enticing four-color ads, advertisers set our fashion and cooking and eating trends, and regulate and promote our social lives. They encourage us to smoke, drink and drive fast cars, and to buy expensive clothes, jewelry, furniture, and hundreds of other products that, for the most part, we don’t really want, often can’t afford, and which seldom live up to their advertising claims. Is there even a remote possibility, for example, that drinking Johnnie Walker Red will make a woman more appealing to a man?

You might want to consider how the magazines you read are affecting the way you spend your time and your money. If you can trace many of your buying patterns to your magazines, perhaps it’s time to cancel your subscriptions. This is one of the easiest ways to reduce the number of “Buy! Buy! Buy!” messages you are exposed to every day and to free yourself from consumer addictions.

If you’re a magazine addict, go cold turkey on this one. Find a new interest or hobby or reading program to fill in the time you used to spend poring over magazines. You might be amazed to see how much time you’ll have to do the things you’d really like to do.