The Sandwich Generation And The Search For A Slot

Some label her the “ex porn star” while others prefer to define her “the Queen of Trash”. In both cases, Bella Nilsson, the Swedish businesswoman (who in the meantime seems to have assumed the new name of Fariba Vancor), is having her moment of notoriety beyond the Swedish borders. The reason is due to a story whose plot has already been widely staged (the vertiginous rise and equally disastrous fall of a public figure who has meticulously constructed his/her own image) and which still manages to incite stupor and indignation in public opinion.

In these days, in which Chiara Ferragni, the influencer with almost 30 million followers, was caught out in a far from edifying affair to do with sponsorship for charity, in Sweden everyone is talking about Bella Nilsson and her Think Pink. A company for waste disposal handling made famous by a catchy marketing move: the choice of shocking pink for the bags in which it collected waste. It’s such a pity that part of the bags and their contents were buried all over parts of Sweden rather than being properly disposed of. “The worst environmental crime in Sweden for half a century”, commented the investigators who conducted the enquiry which found toxic levels of arsenic, dioxins, lead, zinc and copper.

She, of course, denies everything and it will be the trial that decides who is to blame. But, meanwhile, indignation and contempt are growing at the same rate as did her notoriety and approval when she could still be called the “Queen of Trash” and she managed her divided soul with equanimity. The environmental activist with a touch of femininity on the one hand, and the pragmatic unscrupulous businesswoman on the other. And while it is interesting to understand how one can live with such a profound contradiction, almost a schism of one’s own ego, it is equally fascinating to highlight the mechanisms of how a personality can be created and destroyed in this age of the social network.

It seems that a pink bag, a small but catchy part of a successful marketing strategy, is enough to allow anybody (and by anybody I mean a personality who ventures into an ambience in which s/he has no particular skill or experience) to acquire a stock of practically infinite trust. This means that nobody dares to ask the obvious question: are we sure that the pink bags guarantee that the waste is being disposed of as it should be? But since the trust acquired is actually based on nothing, it is doomed to vanish as quickly as it appears. The passage from queen to criminal is immediate and hard to counter also because it feeds on that sentiment of payback that each of us feels, deep down, when we see the decline of a personality who had acquired the success that we, on the other hand, will never succeed in having. A bit of Schadenfreude, a bit of necessary cleaning up of illegal and immoral praxes. We like to think that justice wins in the end.

For this reason, the stories about Bella Nilsson and her like will continue to accompany us, like a sort of archetypal social which we can use to neutralize our feelings of inadequacy, our frustrations and our cravings for success. It remains for us to ask why, given that the strategy has been seen so often, the various Bella Nilssons of this world have not yet learned the lesson. It is true that when you are arrogantly convinced that reality coincides with your own narrow mind or your own point of view, then you get engulfed in self-referentiality and it’s easy to believe that the sun shines out of your own navel. A generational trend, not just an individual one. It is often applicable to those born around 1975 to 1976 but who are generally clumped together with the more widely defined X Generation (1965-1975, Nilsson was born in 1969), characterized, as a segment, by total opacity and crushed between the exuberance of Baby Boomers, and the Xennials before them, and suffering from the visibility of the first Millenials (from 1977 on), already capable of quicker thinking (the socials came with the Millenials). There are obviously the usual exceptions, though quite rare in actual fact, that only confirm the rule. In conclusion, when the limelight is stolen by others, even negative behavior à la Bella Nilsson to be clear, seem to make it admissible to grab a bit of the light for oneself.