Somehow businesses have managed to convince people it’s normal to waste countless hours of their life listening to someone else tell them what they need to buy so they can be happy and fulfilled. We’re bombarded by it. Radio, TV, internet, social media, busses, billboards, flyers, junk mail, email spam. It’s everywhere. It completely pervades our society and lives. It’s pervasive and it’s anything but normal.
It’s a sign of a seriously sick culture, and somehow we’ve all become brainwashed and numb to its harmful effects.
You might find Edward Bernays and his impact on advertising interesting.
One of the numerous problems for America’s magnates was the consumption of the average citizen. Many only purchased what they really needed, a behaviour which moguls wanted to change. The Wall Street banker Paul Mazur summarised this in a particularly straightforward manner: ‘We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture’, he wrote in 1927 in the Harvard Business Review. ‘People must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old have been entirely consumed.’
https://www.historytoday.com/miscellanies/original-influencer
https://www.npr.org/2005/04/22/4612464/freuds-nephew-and-the-origins-of-public-relations
With exceptions of few countries, I believe the modern society is closer to the novel Brave New World than 1984 story. People have been convinced to accept control by way of pleasure. To forget the mundane and realities of life in exchange for gratification by constant triggering of our own biochemistry that induces the feeling of pleasure. We are encouraged buy the things we don’t need to impress the people we don’t like, so that consumer spending will keep the all-mighty economy kept being fed. But if we complain that we don’t have enough left for essentials, then we are told it’s because we keep buying iPhone or avocado toast. The media will say that the economy is slowing down because of less consumer spending, but then chastise us for doing the exact same thing we are told to do: spend and spend.
Imagine a generation of people centering even their nostalgia around commercial products instead of interpersonal relationships and life experiences. Those things are replaced by products that are becoming crucial to creating it, like game consoles, commercials, printed media - just abysmal
What’s abysmal?
People are going to have nostalgia for the the things they grew up with.
The house you grew up in, your neighbourhood, the school you went to, tv shows, games, whatever.
These things don’t replace nostalgia for interpersonal relationships and life experiences, they supplement them.
I put on a Youtube channel of 80’s commercials as a pre-roll before a scheduled meeting, it was wildly popular
