You win. I’ll buy your mushroom superfood even if I don’t want to. Just agree to stop carpet-bombing my social media with your relentless advertising.
I don’t have the energy to fight it anymore. The irony is that your mushroom superfood promises to give me more energy, which I wish I had now, so I could resist ordering it.
It seems like every week there’s a new superfood. I can usually ignore the ads, but not when I see them three hundred times a day. I’m not so much convinced as overwhelmed, and perhaps tacitly blackmailed. I’ll give you however much money you want to make them go away.
According to your ads, mushroom supplements provide a number of benefits. Specifically, every benefit—balance, focus, clarity, cognition, calmness, endurance, vigor, alertness, awareness, and immortality for all I know. It doesn’t matter if they don’t do any of that, I’ll buy them if it means I don’t have to think about them anymore.
The people in your videos are excited about adaptogens. I’ll be excited about them too, even though I don’t know what they are. I’ll swear to my friends and family that adaptogens have changed my life. Just tell me what you want me to do!
Is it possible that something we’ve been eating our whole lives has suddenly been recognized as a miracle panacea? The answer is yes, if enough ads say it is.
At night, I dream about mushrooms I’d never heard of before, like chaga, reishi, and cordyceps. At this point, I don’t even care if you’re making up those names. Take my credit card and charge me whatever you want, as long as you never mention them again.
I’ll eat your pebbles of desiccated fungus even if they taste as disgusting as they look. I’ll pour them in a bowl, cover them in a musty mound of mushroom powder, and choke them down with a thick glass of mushroom smoothie. I'll eat them until the scent of mushrooms comes leaking out my pores, like a drunk's booze sweat. And you’ll leave my TikTok feed alone.
Do we have a deal?
I’m starting to think that maybe I do need your products because, frankly, I’m worried about my vitality. I wasn’t concerned before I saw your endless stream of actors talking about my vitality, but now I feel just so… unvital. SEND ME VITALITY-BOOSTING MUSHROOMS NOW!
I do have some questions, like which is better: mushroom coffee or mushroom tea? Is mushroom coffee like a mushroom-flavored coffee, which sounds repulsive, or is it a coffee-like beverage made entirely from mushrooms, which seems even worse? Either way, I’ll drink it, even if it makes me gag, and gives me caffeine withdrawal migraines.
It’s possible scientists will discover that medicinal mushrooms do none of the things you claimed, but in the meantime, sell me some “coffee” that tastes like dirty socks mildewing in a root cellar.
But first, have you seen the ads for chlorella algae superfood? It looks and tastes like pond scum. I better order some, or I’ll never stop hearing about it.