Why should I have a personality?

I remember the Toyota ad campaign that ran in the early 80’s. There were ones where people take a characteristic jump of enjoyment after sharing their Toyota story? It was before that. It’s the traditional love triangle; man, woman, car. He’s not sure whether it’s him or his Toyota she truly loves. So goes the misery of consumption; exiled from knowing desire fully, we prefer to act as if our mad dash after glittering ideals will produce a surrogate pleasure, a love of our own lacking life. Discontented civilization is captured by the dialectic of a plenitude in which we cannot share and a base existence we always exceed, surplus and lack. There is too much, but there is not enough.

Car or girl, there is an urgency to having it all, or trying to. So if this is the dominant reality of the culture, the story told again and again, to exceed, are cultural arenas able to develop some resistance, barricade themselves against this, or do the echo and amplify it.