Sex and the meaning of life - a dissonance in two parts

The Babes of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror

The Search for the meaning of life

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At the top of this post I have two links. Did you notice them? Did you click on one? Did you consider clicking on one of them?

I have a lot of websites, several blogs on different subjects and a lot of material online.

One of the sites I have is called "The babes of science fiction, fantasy & horror. Another site I have is all about the meaning of life. (these are the two links at the top of this post)

Here is the thing about these two sites: I have spent a lot of time working on the meaning of life site and I have done a lot of work pushing it. I threw together the site about babes and I don't advertise it in anyway except a couple of links.

The babe website easily gets 100 times more traffic than the meaning of life site.

Why is this? Now, let me first say that there is nothing wrong with sex, and nothing wrong with babes or movies or any such thing. But, I do believe that there is nothing more important that trying to understand this mystery we are all living. It should be our top priority. Why are we here? what are we meant to do/be?

Yet, nobody seems to care.

Convenience store revisited

For a few months, not too long ago I took a part time job in a convenience store. It was kind of nostalgic for me because as a teenager I worked in a convenience store and in college I co-owned one.

After a few weeks of working there a great sadness came over me. This was once the intitial rush of learning a new job set it -once i had time to do my job with ease and think about what was going on. let me explain.

I think a convenience store is an indicator of how empty a life we are living.

All day long hundreds of people rush in and rush out. THis is what they buy: Cigarettes, rolling papers, lottery tickets, crap in all kinds of endless variations, sugar and chocolate in endless variations, gasoline.

I used to look at the cooler where we keep our drinks and a great sadness would come over me. The cooler was the length of the whole back wall and about twnety five feet long with multiple glass doors and it is filled with junk. But it is all junk that is carefully created to appeal to somebody. Want to be more sexy? Buy this drink. Are you a go-getter? Buy this drink. Need more energy? Buy this drink. Chic? Buy this one. It was a thousand variations of the same thing -sugar water.

All these drinks are carefully marketed to make you think you are making a statement about yourself. What statement are you really making?


Taking a careful look around the store one day I tried to assess what in the store was sizzle and what was steak - what had real value and what was intrinsically meaningless and this is what I came up with. About 97% of all the items in the store were meaningless junk.

If I were to take a guess at revenue I would say that 99.5% of all sales came from the meaningless things. -sad

There were cans of wholesome food in the store, but they rarely sold and every week I would have to dust them off. I never had to dust off a box of candy bars.

Sell the sizzle and not the steak

For the term of one 3 year lease I co-owned a convenience store. It was an interesting project for me and I got to meet a lot of people. It was something I was doing to supplement my income during college but it wasn't how I envisioned my life to unfold so I eventually moved on to other things.

I did have a small epiphany during my tenure with the store.


We have a local businessman that owns a chain of convenience stores and he has done quite well. My business partner managed to wrangle him into coming by our store to take a look and maybe offer us suggestions on how to improve our bottom line.

He went through our store foot by foot and did offer us a lot of good advice on how to improve sales. There was one particular phrase that he used over and over. During the course of the hour that he was with us he must have repeated it at least twenty times. Here is the phrase: "Sell the sizzle and not the steak"

What he meant by this is that we should push the meaningless and empty high sugar and high eye candy items (these items have a high profit margin) and we should not push the items that are of low sizzle factor.

Let me give you some examples; and these are tricks that convenience stores use to get more money from you.

1. Put your milk and bread all the way in the back of the store. People need these items on a daily basis but there is low profit in them. When people walk all the way to the back of the store then to the counter in front they have to walk by a lot of your sizzle items twice. This means they may crack open their purses and buy something they didn't originally come in for.

2. Fill your countertop with lots of little sweet things and interesting looking little trinkets. While people are waiting in line they will add these items to their purchase.

3. In the front of your cashiers counter, down low near the floor, put lots of candy. Children will see these items and pester parents to buy them.

4. When you put a new case of an item out, lets say a box of 48 candy bars, take one candy bar out of the box. Don't leave a perfectly full box on the shelf. People are hesitant to buy from a full box. they will more quickly buy from a case that someone else has bought from. This is a follow the leader type of psychology. (If someone else bought one then they must be good. If the case is perfectly full, nobody has bought any and maybe there is something wrong with them or they are not good.


Okay, that is enough of the examples. My point here is not to teach you convenience store tactics. My point is to show you that there are very specific tactics that do work. And these tactics are all about selling the sizzle and not the steak.

This psychology never held well with me. It is hard to describe but it feels like we have built an ocean that is one inch deep yet hundreds of miles wide. Theres no real substance.

Is this what our culture is about? A never ending search for sizzle? Is this what you need to do to be successful in our culture?

Note: Does selling the sizzle work? Of course it does but here is a bit of proof:

My third year gross income for the convenience store was 160% of my first year revenue.