Hey, that’s my brand!

August 21st, 2006

About a year and a half ago I did drugs for the first time. Ecstasy to be exact. It was the most amazing experience ever, I will admit. I had many revelations that night. It would be safe to say that of those revelations, the one that has had the greatest impact on my life is the fact that on that night, I realized that everything is the same. I mean everything. Like your dirty socks are the same as the glass used in BMW windshields (which is very high quality glass, by the way). Now before you go dismissing me, hear me out.

I believe there is no such thing as a straight line in life. Everything is a circle. Everything. Cycles if you will. Just as the Conservation of Energy states, matter cannot be created nor destroyed. Just changed. That is, in any closed system (like our Universe), what is already here is all we have. We cannot “create” more. We can only take what was given to us and manipulate it, or change it. Everything goes through a cycle. Ups and downs. Ins and outs. If you try hard enough, I bet you can list 100 cycles in less that 2 minutes. Go.

We’ve all been presented with this idea our entire lives (the one about matter). First in grade school and again in college. Probably the most influential presentation of the idea (to me at least) came in the form a movie. If you’ve not seen “I ♥ Huckabees”, please do. It ranks very high in my poll of favorites. Now, it didn’t get very good marks, but I’m confident the critics didn’t see past its witty exterior. (Critics are often very shallow anyway.) The movie is super deep, and probably only 1% of the population actually gets what the movie is about anyway. After taking ecstasy, I was able to join that 1%.

It’s a movie about existentialism. I’m not going to link to the definition because if you don’t know what it means, I’m going to leave it up to you to look it up. It’s about everything being connected. Like friends on myspace, or the geese in a flying V. Connected. Every connection has an even smaller connection, and so on, and so on. Everything that you are made of is infinitely related to everything around you. I guarantee if you think hard enough, you can connect my dirty socks to the glass in my car in less that 5 degrees. Try it. Now I could go on and on about my theory, (which I already did here), but it’s a bit off topic for this post.

I decided to write about this after reading a few articles tonight about corporate branding. Google (who now rivals Coca-Cola for the number one recognized brand in the world) has sent cease and desist letters to a select group of individuals who are ‘googling’ things. Now, I’m sure each of you has used the term google as a verb before. It’s every companies dream to become a household name. That is until it becomes a household name. All the effort once put behind the brand to get it into the home is now refocused on protecting it from genericification (I think I made that word up). Apple is doing the same thing with the iPod. Sadly, it’s too late for Xerox and Band-Aid. (Ever wonder why they say, “Band-Aid Brand” in their commercials now? That’s why.) Yep, you’ve guessed it. As I promised, everything is a circle and this brings me back, full circle, to my beginning points. Everything is the same. I like to call it the teeter-totter of life. You have to give to get. Because when you think about it, that’s all we really can do.

Ecstasy, circle, Energy, existentialism, corporate branding, I Heart Huckabees

Entry Filed under: Life