The pillow is a significant object because of the demand it receives. Today in our culture everyone has pillows. Pillows are comfortable to sleep with and they are good for support on our necks but I believe the desire for the pillow is not intrinsic. Sleeping without a pillow was pretty uncomfortable I woke up the next morning and my neck suffered in many areas of discomfort. I would explain it as an inconvenience. Simply because It is not something we necessarily need in order to survive but it is one of the objects we need in order to live and sleep comfortably. The desire that beings share in correlation to comfort is something that abstract in many ways that can be proven. As I indulge more and more into the analysing the need of the pillow, I believe that we will come across some interesting theories and ideas. One idea that I would like to unpack would be the question of why do we immensely depend on the comfort from pillows as well as other objects. We look for comfort through items as well as people. When we’re feeling sad we look for someone to console us and to tell us that things will be okay. We look for people when we need a hug because we’re having a bad day, we go to the doctor when our bodies are physically uncomfortable, we look for comfort in familiarity, we subconsciously look for comfort.
Why do we depend on comfort so excessively?
Comfort seems to be socializing us as consumers. Why is it so normal for us to depend on others people for our personal comfort. Why don’t we look for comfort in ourselves? The pillow is an object that has been around for a while now, since ancient times. It is primarily used to provide comfort for people when relaxing of some sort. Mostly everyone sleeps with pillows or has them around their living area in someway or another, unless they’re less fortunate to provide them for themselves. This object is made of feather or cotton like material, it is very soft and comes in all different shapes and sizes. Pillows can be the size of a composition notebook to the size of your average human being, some smaller, and some bigger. Some pillows are just used for decor and some are used to provide comfort to the relaxed body. Pillows are usually made in factories then shipped off to retailers of different sorts. Pillows are a part of everyday culture. You see them in everyone's place of living, you see them in cars, hotels, pool areas, and many other places.
Pillows are usually very comforting to sleep on, pillows are usually used in reference to clouds because they’re beautiful objects in life. The material that pillows are made of look like clouds. We feel the desire to yearn comfort. We no longer seek that comfort from human being or social interaction we seek it through this material object known as a pillow. But how could a pillows comfort be equivalent to human interaction? We seek comfort at night. Perhaps when there’s no one there so we buy body pillows which makes us feel as though a being is there. When someone is there we still seek that comfort. We have pillows that provides us with voice notes of the ones we love and value. We have pillows that we used to lean against and have arms so we feel as though someone is holding us. As technology proliferates we continue to move away from social interaction. Within centuries I would imagine that we will no longer seek the physical presence of people. There will be an item to replace us.
Without comfort we feel uncomfortable; being uncomfortable is not a feeling we like experiencing. So we look for that comfort in people and in tangible objects. We depend on this item of tangible so much that we can not see past it. We now put the pillows in our cars, we now feel uncomfortable without them. We now make beds with the same material as we do pillows. There are also some good health benefits behind this also. People sleep better due to the comfort that is being provided from the pillow
Taking time to evaluate the purpose of pillows is one that should be well analysed. Are pillows influencing us to shift away from human dependency? Gain a new perception of pillows and the role they play within our culture.
