What are we, deep down? Victorian phrenologists used to tell us our natures by the bumps on our heads, and fortune-tellers always claimed the left hand showed the real facts about personal destiny. But in a mass mail-shot delivered this week to the Dublin region, the truth as we may have to face it is out. Shoppio ergo sum. We consume, therefore we are.
The latent psycho-babble that makes up this survey relies on our public-spiritedness, while claiming we need better choice. "Did you know," it confides, "that eight out of 10 new products fail?" Why? Because people decide they're not needed. How ungallant of us, we may conclude, and set to reading a series of questions that give anal retentiveness a whole new spin.
Sections that ask us about everything except whether we beat our partners or sleep with them more than once a week cover a ground that says much about how global companies think we define ourselves. Their obvious appeal is that most of us love playing "quizzes", and filling in boxes can give some of us a much-needed sense of control.
Identity from this point of view is born of the way we fit into the following categories: hobbies and activities; shopping; health and beauty; household products; motoring; and the one that carries a special warning, you and your home. Or to paraphrase Shakespeare, what a heap of (expensive) junk is man.
The boxes that litter this survey come perilously close to breaching the Data Protection Act, save for the small-print warning that reminds us we don't have to answer if we don't want to, and need not receive "special offers" if we make the right mark in a particularly small box.
Answer the survey completely and companies worldwide, which pay a British market research agency, Claritas, for the information, will be able to tell who you are, where you are, what you read/ see/eat/play with, what you owe, everything about the value of your car and house including when the insurance is due, the charities you favour, the make-up, hygiene and household products you use, along with where you buy them all in the first place and how often you use them.
Plus your credit card allegiances, what you earn and how you invest your money. All 150-plus questions asked in the name of giving us consumers that empty slogan "better choice".
Worse choice, more like. Having such choice is not in our interests, or not on the terms on offer. Take sanitary products, for example. The commandment to choose from a product base of 17 types, each with myriad brands, sub-categories and special needs, may explain the extraordinary rise of PMT in Western women better than any suspect physiological data can.
Or household sprays and disinfectants, which prey on this generation's fear of smelling anything other than vanilla essence or mountain pine dew. Why waste money and energy buying litres of water-based chemicals when you could use millilitres instead dissolved in water used to boil the spuds? Why spend hours exploring the relative merits of 69 varieties of polish/wax/air-freshener when you could be enjoying the benefits of real-life fun? If only two out of 10 new products are in fact needed, then don't keep harping on the merits of the remaining eight.
The illusion of choice is in fact a tyranny that forces us to spend more time and money than we might otherwise choose on activities designed to permanently whet our appetites for novelty and the reward of keeping clean.
Must personal hygiene be a stressful experience? Or as this survey inquires: do you agree with the statement "My hair is a direct expression of my personal style." Let's hope not.
This tyranny reaches its worst excesses in the plastic temples of the supermarket aisle.
So insidious is the use of marketing psychology in every aspect, from the patterning of floor tiles (longer ones make you feel expansive so you spend more) to those low-level sweets, toys, comics and biscuits guaranteed to turn the most acquiescent toddlers into fire-breathing gladiators, that you must conclude the supermarket dictates the terms of the transaction, not us.
Just as you relax into a familiar lay-out, which allows you to shop on automatic pilot and save time, the psycho-shopping experts change the layout again, so that you are forced to look with fresh eyes on the millions of products and more likely to be tempted into buying new ones.
Move the garlic bread, and you walk an extra 10 metres looking and feeling like a lost sheep. Move the fish tank where the crabs and goldfish scuttle about like Teletubbies and you have no way of escaping to the cake counter without your children finding out.
The rise of the one-stop shopping centre means companies decide what we eat or buy, and make us fit their commercial relations. If they decide not to carry plum jam, for example, you won't find it anywhere.
If they decide not to highlight ethically-produced products, your only chance is to memorise a litany of dos and don'ts, ranging from the use of child labour to exploitative practices in the harvesting of coffee beans to that curious anti-ecological substance in washing powders that could help save the Earth.
All that, presuming you can also decipher the alphabet of additives and e-numbers which adds hours to the time it takes to do your shopping, makes it less likely that you will.
You can't barter, so you can't be sure you are getting value for money, just as you will never really know the quality of most products.
Finally, you will be seduced by advertising that promises the possibility of finding true love over your awkward trolley, or forming bonds of companionship in barked exchanges at the dogfood shelves.
The vicious truth that a spot of retail therapy brings you nothing but sore feet and a heap of bills is but one of the jewels incorporated in the latest and greatest ESRI survey, which sets out the state of the nation in a range of statistical ways.
We're spending, not saving, according to them. But the survey we need to have completed is one which turns the retail business on its head. What are the profit-margins on the foods we buy?
What about a shoppers' charter which guarantees ethical shopping and reduces information to a friendly read?
I say, keep them guessing until they do.