Comment by nkrisc
People can choose to not consume crap they don’t need. They won’t, but they can.
Advertising is now just worthless noise to me because I generally don’t buy stuff anymore but what I need.
I can’t imagine why anyone would buy most of the crap I see advertised, but they do. Halloween was a recent example: how many tons of plastic shit for costumes was shipped from China only to be thrown away the next day? How much candy was bought? Even when I was 12 I started to see what a disgusting consumerist affair the whole thing was and it lost its appeal. And yet we have adults participating.
The ad machine exists because people let it be successful.
Would you make the same argument for smoking?
I think we’re in a world so dominated by the attention economy and things optimized to hook us in that it’s hard to just say “I quit”.