Will a man wear shorts or ride a bike? A man must be lazing around in the village for at least 6 hours – Pashinyan

The 21st century is the age of marketing. For instance, cigarettes come in beautifully designed packages, while a healthy lifestyle lacks its own attractive branding. Our entire problem is that a healthy lifestyle needs branding. Take, for example, food with the highest sugar content, which has such branding and design that you look at it and want it. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan made this remark during a government meeting regarding universal health insurance.

“A healthy lifestyle must have branding. In the 21st century, anything that lacks branding does not exist, which means it’s not there. In the 21st century, if there is branding, there is a product; if there is no branding, then there is no product. Our problem is not that there’s no place to run; our problem is that the product of a healthy lifestyle is not branded; on the contrary, the opposite is branded,” he stated.

According to Pashinyan, under the logic of criminal subculture, a healthy lifestyle can even be seen as shameful: “We did not understand, will a man wear shorts or ride a bike? Should a man lazily hang around in the village for at least 6 hours? By the way, I’m mentioning the village, but there are thousands of such village-like areas in Yerevan, and we need to talk about this. The biggest problem is that discussing this in our reality is not accepted, because there are things worth talking about. How can we even talk about this, or how can we discuss this at the government level in a cabinet meeting? The government is the place, and that meeting is the place, where if something is not discussed, it means that issue will not be resolved, meaning that problem will continue to exist. Yes, a healthy lifestyle is losing, because they are investing billions in their formal and informal branding to break the branding of a healthy lifestyle,” the Prime Minister emphasized.

Pashinyan further asserted that it is precisely the government that has an interest in branding and making a healthy lifestyle appealing.