In the marketing industry, there is a tactic called creating a need and filling it. Teeth whitening is a perfect example. It isn't healthy, it's terrible unnatural, and, of course, it certainly isn't a need. We throw that word around a lot these days, when the actual noun to be used is "want". And we can want unneeded things horribly; a crude, infantile want that surrounds us with the desperate asphyxiation of a boa constrictor. It can hover as an intoxicating gas, filling our lungs so that we breathe it in and, when forced, begrudgingly breathe it out. It can become an obsession, this want, setting up shop in the brain and snubbing any weak-willed landlord who meekly offers an eviction notice.

How could something so insistently powerful have come to be? It isn't a need, as we've said. There are three basic needs in addition to one which is only a need as far as living goes; it is of no consequence in escaping the coroner. The three basic needs are food, clothing, and shelter. The fourth is love. The want that may possess us is entirely unaffiliated with these, and with any other emotion, for that matter. So again, how did it come about?

There is a vast chance that it was started by the very obvious choice of the marketing industry. With pretty pictures and reassuring voices coming from beautiful mouths with too-white teeth and the power to shoot these esthetically pleasing moments into our brains as frequently as they may, is it such a wonder? The question of why we can wait in line for hours for a product that we've been drooling over for weeks to find it in our hands and become bored, well, that question becomes almost rhetorical. It's about the hunt that those pretty pictures and sounds have inspired. The want is all they need.