I Want to Live Like People in Pharmaceutical Commercials
For those of you who don’t watch the evening news on TV (which is pretty much everyone except me), it’s in trouble. And has been for years.
The audience for TV news is aging out. Those of us who were kids when Cronkite was king are now pushing retirement. And most people who were adults when Uncle Walt ruled the airwaves, well… rest in peace.
Prima facie evidence of the aging of TV news audiences is the ads. For the past two decades or so, most of them have been for drugs that target a smorgasbord of mid- and old-age ailments and treatments:
- High cholesterol
- Erectile dysfunction
- Brittle bones
- Memory lapses
- Constipation
- Back pain
- Obesity (to be fair, I know some pretty fat Gen Zers as well)
- Dry eye
- Poop-in-a-box mail order colonoscopies
I relate to (almost) all of them.
But I look and live nothing like these poor, sickly people in the commercials. Because despite being (apparently) on Death’s door, they are whitewater rafting, going on dates, scuba diving off private yachts and taking baths in antique claw-foot bathtubs overlooking the Mediterranean before gettin’ jiggy with it.
I’m going to physical therapy, buying stretch denim and getting up to pee 5x/night.
I’d rather have ulcerative colitis and go heli-skiing in Chamonix.
It’s not just the network evening news that is on life support: All of linear television is dying. Think CNN, the networks, ESPN, pretty much everything that constitutes the “old” media landscape. (If only there were a pill for shifting media paradigms.)
They are being inexorably replaced by TikTok, YouTube, social media and all manner of self-created, unedited, un-fact-checked content that are the informational equivalent of fried Oreos and Kool-Aid: tastes great, ZERO nutritional/informational value.
But I digress. Back to my prostate. As I approach the start of my seventh decade on Earth (let THAT sink in), I am torn between clinging to old habits (like the evening news) and trying to keep up with the hip, cool kids who are into current cultural trends like Amy Winehouse, Harry Potter and Pokeman.
It’s hard confronting one’s mortality in the form of peppy people living their best lives in TV ads while they are suffering from debilitating toenail fungus.
Maybe the answer is to forsake ALL electronic media and just go back to reading Sports Illustrated, Playboy and clipping coupons from the daily paper.
[Author is handed a note]
I’ve just been told that none of those things exist anymore.
Time to Google the latest anti-anxiety medication.
Does Xanax come in gummies?