Would you like spiritual guidance with that?

The other week I went in to lululemon expecting to find a normal store selling running shorts. Instead I found a weird cult selling running shorts.

This place has a manifesto which sounds like it was written by your crazy great aunt during that period where her medication wasn’t quite right. Some of the pearls of wisdom incorporated into this manifesto include:

* Children are the orgasm of life.
* Do not use cleaning chemicals on your kitchen counters.
* Take various vitamins.
* Don’t trust that an old age pension will be sufficient.
* Visualise your eventual demise.

My initial reaction was to get away really fast and avoid drinking anything which looked like Kool-Aid. However I did get mightily intrigued when I saw personal ten year plans posted around the store from various customers/cult members. Sadly most of these people just planned on having real estate, kids and a flat stomach in ten years time and hadn’t outlined anything that interesting. The five year and ten year plans did however strike me as a very communist thing to do for a commercial enterprise.

One of the other strange juxtapositions was the huge Buddha statue positioned next to the cash register. From my understanding Buddha gave away fabulous wealth to sit under a tree. I don’t think he was really in to designer fitness wear.

I think the weird jumbled together ideology really is however really smart. Obviously lululemon is cashing in on the fact that most people have abandoned mainstream religion in favour of their own jumbled together ideologies. They don’t want long drawn out parables in a cold church; they want quick advice about benchtop cleaning and strange metaphors relating children to orgasms. it all makes sense really.