Tired of Your Life? Outsource It For Fun and Profit!
UNLESS YOU ARE A JET-SETTER, COMMUNE CLOSELY WITH THE LORD, OR HAVE AN UNNATURALLY HIGH NATURAL OCCURRENCE OF SEROTONIN IN YOUR BRAIN, you probably are human enough to feel the occasional existential angst of pointlessness.
Psssst? Wanna sell your life?
You can. Such is the modern apex at which we have arrived: where meaning, communications and commerce collide.
Meet Ian Usher, 44, who posted his life for sale on eBay, the package including a three-bedroom house in Perth, Western Australia, his car, motorbike, clothes and try-out for his job at a rug store. The wholesale dumping of his life came after what we can assume was a bad breakup of a 12 year relationship. How sad. What's even sadder is that the story's headline says Usher stopped taking bids at $2.1 million when he deemed the escalating price exceeded his life's worth. How very sad indeed!
(Actually, not really, but you have to read the fine print to find out the real deal.)
Usher isn't the first to offer his life for sale on the Internet. Australian philosophy student Nicael Holt, 24, offered his life to the highest bidder last year purportedly "in a protest about mass consumerism." Included in the sale were "eight potential lovers," so Holt really wasn't kidding when he said he was a Socialist.
He wrote at the time, "I did this because I was a little intrigued as to what exactly constitutes a life; a little intrigued as to what people want that they aren't receiving from their current life; a little bit because I'm a socialist and was hoping to make a point that the amount and type of things that are for sale in this world is insane and wasteful; a bit because I was a little intrigued as to what makes me who I am and at exactly what point in this experiment will I lose it, if ever." Okay.
Another kook offered to sell his soul back in 2001. But eBay shut the auction because the sale didn't include anything ''tangible." No, his name was not Dorian Gray.
Perhaps the best example of shilling one's life is
John Freyer, who became a pop sociology project when he sold his possessions on eBay in 2001 and then later documented and or visited the items in their new homes. Even Freyer's domain name -- www.allmylifeforsale.com -- was sold: It is now a part of the ethereal permanent collection of the University of Iowa, Museum of Art.
Though Crabby rarely falls prey to the chest-swelling of prideful Americans, is Freyer not an example of America at its most ingenius? He turns a slacker life into a sociological project-cum-work-of-art-cum-book! He's living proof that marketing genius is in our ether.
Posted June 24, 2008
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