By Siân Clarke, Head of Ads, Sales and Marketing
In the world of today, driven by hatred, division, greed, and violence – the most rebellious act is, ironically, to love your neighbour. To ask if the man complaining of chest pains in a pharmacy wants someone to accompany him to A&E, even when you have a shift in a couple of hours and know that the painfully long wait will make you late. Choosing people over profit is not just a slogan hastily scribbled onto placards, but should be the mantra we choose to live our own lives by.
When was the last time you ensured the bus waited for that stressed schoolchild sprinting up Park Street, or donated a tin of peaches to your local foodbank? None of these actions benefit us financially; indeed, helping others almost always sets us back in that regard. But that exploitation of those around us is what allows capitalism to thrive so successfully. Many Americans feign ignorance at the atrocious ICE attacks, but if these same Americans worked hard to see the victims as people, to hold empathy and compassion for them, they would not become the stagnant bystanders and silent enablers of fascism that we see today.
When it comes to Valentine's Day, it is easy to view the couples bombarding our screens, streets, and favourite places today with hatred. Seeing them reminds us of our own inadequacy, our failure to find our ‘other half’, an ideal strived to be achieved from the time of the Ancient Greeks. Everywhere you turn, corporations (big and small) shove plastic roses, bright reds and pinks, and cheap chocolate down our throats, suffocating us in our supposed loneliness. It feels normal and correct to internalize this, to spend today with our phones on ‘Do Not Disturb’, a corked bottle of Lidl’s own brand rosé by our beds, wondering why we aren’t good enough to be loved. But in doing so, we ignore all the other forms of love that surround us, placing lifelong platonic friendships below a situationship with mediocre shags.
In recent weeks, social media has begun to flood with dreams of a village – people who look out for each other, bringing food over when someone loses a loved one, driving people to the airport – all foundational acts of friendship that are becoming unheard of. The response that appears most is ‘You can’t have a village if you’re not willing to be a villager’, which whilst correct on a surface level, fails to acknowledge the nuance behind the lack of community. With hundreds of thousands of graduates competing for a few thousand grad jobs, supporting others whilst you go through the application process together is counterintuitive and systemically naïve. The same logic can easily be applied outwards, where capitalism decrees competition (supply and demand anyone?), especially between individuals. We are ranked from birth, placed in percentiles of productivity from the millisecond we utter our first word, and then wonder: why do we feel so inadequate?
Even with AI and technological advancements, corporations need workers and consumers to give their products value, and this depends upon, crudely, heterosexual sex to produce babies. Considering every news article seems to depict another horrifically unspeakable event and the cost of living crisis, new babies are simply not appearing fast enough and birth rates worldwide are declining. It is not coincidental that this Valentine's feels more paraded by companies than ever before.
I urge you to view this day not as a capitalistic charade thinly veiled by pink, but instead as a reminder to prioritise your loved ones. Just as you don’t need expensive gifts from a partner to have a good Valentine's if in a relationship, you also do not need an overtly elaborate declaration of love for your friends. Nothing is more romantic than prioritising genuine acts of love for those around you, and nothing is more needed right now. So, turn your phone off of ‘Do Not Disturb’, call a family member or a long-lost friend; learn a family recipe and share it with your housemates; buy a homeless person a pack of cigarettes and a pint; above all love.
Tom Forbes
And who knows? Maybe these acts will help you create the village you crave. Because you genuinely only live once, and the world is far too miserable right now not to tell your friends you love them.
Featured image: Epigram / Siân Clarke
How will you show love to those you care about this Valentine's Day?
