Why Those Progressive* Ads Will Destroy Us

And also a book you probably don't want to read unless you're a very particular kind of reader/person

Yesterday I passed a couple of guys in a Trader Joe’s parking lot building a cart corral and asked them if it came with an Allen wrench in the box. I think they thought it was funny.

The Starbucks at the airport accidentally made me two mochas, so I offered it to the crowd and when no one accepted, I took it to the guy at the check-in desk for my flight.

I chased after someone who’d dropped something.

I helped a lady get her bags off the plane.

I told the people waiting on line in the bathroom that there were more stalls hidden around a weird corner.

In other words, I was generally friendly, I chatted with some people I didn’t know and I tried to be helpful when I could have just kept my head down and my mouth shut. Apparently I’m turning into somebody at Geico’s advertising agency’s parents.

I am not sorry.

I’ve laughed at those ads too, the ones where the tall, calm, upper middle class man helps keep short, hapless, poorly dressed clueless “young homeowners” from “turning into their parents”. And I probably still won’t knock on the bathroom door to get your lunch order, but you know what?

Talk to the other people charging their cars or filling them up with gas. Share the bathroom code. Let someone know their coffee order is ready. Make a joke in the elevator, talk to your seatmate a little, tell the person in the parking lot that you love their hat. Buy all the garden gnomes you want, baby. It is your garden.

I know. They’re just ads. They’re meant to attract our attention (and clearly they worked on me). But the repeated messages worm their way into our heads, in that way advertisers always do, telling us what’s cool and reminding us that we want to be one way, this way, not the other way, that way. (The biggest irony here may be that Progressive* makes not one single dime off of our embrace of their message.)

The thing is, we don’t want to be like that. We already live in a world where you can easily go days without speaking to another human being. Take a Waymo, grab your Amazon packages off the porch, order your food on a screen, check the box that says leave it outside, and then leave an angry comment underneath a picture of Pamela Anderson at an event without makeup. You’re all set. You took no risks and you were not rejected and you didn’t have to worry that you didn’t have the right shoes or hair.

And did not make even the smallest connection with anyone.

I hate this for us! And I hate Progressive* for even implying that the alternative—maybe being a little too open, a little too chatty, is the problem. That’s not the problem. The problem is that lots of us don’t know our neighbors any more. The problem is that we’ll walk right by someone struggling to lift a stroller into a trunk and figure they don’t want our help.

The problem is that we maybe feel more connected to the person whose “Note” we just replied to, who agrees with us about important things like which is the single best simple white tee shirt and how angry to be about the Mariah Carey Sephora commercial, than anyone in our immediate vicinity.

The problem is, clearly, those Progressive* commercials. Or maybe an entire culture in which we worry more about the shame of being cringe, getting something wrong or offending someone than about letting another human being walk out of a bathroom with toilet paper stuck to her shoe. (It’s not just a cliche, it happened to me last week!)

Wave to the person walking the dog. Heck, pull over and tell them what a great dog it is, what a nice day, how excited you are about Thanksgiving and where you saw a great deal on Pepperidge Farm Cornbread stuffing mix (the only one to have; fight me). Offer to take that mom’s cart back to the cart corral. Check in to see if your neighbor needs anything at the store.

Be the cringe you want to see in the world.

*I originally declared these to be Geico ads and wrote this whole post that way. So apparently while the ads themselves are memorable, they do NOT serve the purpose of getting me to remember WHICH insurance company was so funny/annoying, which honestly I find kind of satisfying. Also hundreds of people read this without noticing either. So…

And also—you’re probably here to read about books!

The book news is limited this week. I read Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil. I quite enjoyed it. It was deeply, deeply weird. This is a book that looked at “Assistant to the Villain” and “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and said, hold my steaming mug of mandrake potion. It has footnotes, takes place in an incomprehensible world in which a beetle pushes the sun across the sky at unpredictable intervals and also, goblins. And a weird not exactly a cat, and a woman who’s been given an encyclopedic set of magic volumes that may or may not free her from her unpleasantly typical sort of Early Middle Ages scrabble for existence.

If you pick it up and read a few pages and they appeal, then I absolutely recommend it. It’s clever and deeper than it at first appears. But it’s not what my friends at Book Riot would call a Swiss Army Rec. I have exactly one friend I would hand this too. Your mileage will vary.

I went to a conference. I read the only advance copy of something I’d downloaded to my Kindle, which I’m also not recommending. (Are you an author who thinks I might have an advance of your book? THIS WAS NOT YOUR BOOK. I swear.) I returned the latest Anthony Horowitz without reading it (I might get it back); I returned the third of the three library books in my possession after reading about 50 pp (no name because I have a horror of some poor author with a Google alert set, but it would be easy enough for you to go back and look—and the answer to “why” is “because if you’re going to write about rich New Yorkers, you should have more awareness than what you gained from Gossip Girl”).

My high school drama teacher sent me his memoir and you can bet I’m going to read that but you almost certainly won’t. (Unless you are the one friend who I’d recommend Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil to. You will! and this is not a diss on my drama teacher; I just don’t think you can even get it unless you’re cool like me* and he sends it to you.) And I started A Complete Fiction, which was gifted to me.

It is mayyyybe time to start reading some holiday romance or just holiday books? I haven’t decided what I’m in the mood for yet this season. You? What will you read between now and Thanksgiving?

*cool like me: I lettered in Forensics by performing Improv. BEAT THAT BAND KID