I buy - therefore I am

Ever thought about it? We're all exposed to a flood of advertising that crashes down on us. Much of it is passive and unintentional, while others are consciously targeted.

What happens when we're bombarded day in and day out with messages, information, and offers that no one usually requests or that many couldn't afford to give in to and buy anyway?

What this plague of advertising has achieved, however, and long since established, is this feeling of consumerism, of being high just from looking and maybe buying.

Other "values," on the other hand, are increasingly fading into the background, forgotten. You know best what you're missing. And what no one can buy.

From today on, I will no longer smoke

Lung cancer is a devilish disease. Anyone who thinks it comes, a brief illness, and then... we all have to die... is twisted. 

Lung cancer takes its time, claiming its three hundred (300) victims every day in Germany alone. Before the fatal diagnosis is actually made, there are years of torment with shortness of breath, a nasty, persistent cough, and a foul smell from one's own lungs... If that's not enough, ... when I once visited the Heckeshorn Lung Clinic in Berlin, the head director led me to a ward. 

In almost every room lay relatively young men, all bald from chemotherapy. Creepy, I say! And at the end of the ward was the usual glass box. And you wouldn't believe it! Inside were three equally bald men... and they were smoking! 

When I asked the professor, both astonished and shocked, what this meant, he replied: "Oh, you know, why should I forbid these poor devils from smoking now? Everyone you saw today will be dead in nine months at the most."
From today on, I will no longer smoke!