Zeklandia

I'm not sure what you think religion is. But this is not religion, nor is it baseless. In fact, the opposite. This is ordinary, empirical science.

If nothing else in your life gave you the idea to buy something but an advertisement did, it's not your idea to buy the thing. I needed a new chair because the one I used to have gave me back pain. I went on Amazon to look for a replacement chair, and because I use an ad-blocker (uBlock Origin), I didn't see any advertisements for chairs (whether there are other features of Amazon that could count as advertising, like the Amazon's Choice branding is, sure, debatable but also besides the point). Instead, I saw a list of chairs with information about them. I looked through the list and found the one I thought would best suit me and bought it. Why did I buy it? Because I felt I needed it since I was concerned that my old chair might have caused back problems if I kept using it.

Since I bought the chair on Amazon, when I don't have an ad-blocker on, like on other people's computers, I can see Amazon showing me advertisements for other chairs. Why? They are trying to convince me, because I showed a willingness to buy chairs, that I need more chairs. There are all sorts of flashy listings showing off the neat gimmicks their chairs are capable of, all to convince customers like me that what we have isn't good enough.

They can't make money if they solved people's problems, so either they design things to break (like planned obsolescence) or they psychologically manipulate people into thinking they have problems they don't have and sell them the solution (InfoWars is this taken to the extreme).

There is a difference between putting information out there for people who want to find it and blasting information at them to get in someone's head and convince them they need to do something for your own benefit.

You're not describing an advertisement, you're describing a listing in a business index like a phonebook or a classifieds section. You don't have to buy ads to show up in a Google search. You buy ads to float your Google search entry to the top so it's right in people's line of sight. If you want people who are looking for entertainment to find you, give pamphlets to your local tourism bureau or travel agencies and hotels to put in their lobbies so that when people are looking for things to do they find you. Advertisements don't provide information to people seeking it, they shove information down people's throats and try to convince them with messaging that people need what is being advertised.

> Good thing there's no authority telling us why we exist and we're each free to decide for ourselves.

You aren't. Everything you do, even doing nothing, has consequences that are beyond your control. Even worse, your actions have consequences not just for you but for others, even people who don't yet exist. We only exist today because generation after generation of the people that came before us have worked together to survive. You absolutely can choose to be a selfish idiot, but selfish idiots go extinct very quickly because they greedily consume the resources they depend on. There are also people who recognize the threat selfish idiots pose to themselves and others and may intervene to stop them from mucking things up not just for themselves but for others. Remember, you yourself took the effort and resources of the human race to get you where you are. Your life is on loan to you from the universe.

Just like the cells in your body, humans work together to make things more capable than themselves individually. Just like the cells in your body, humans are constantly replaced by a new generation that takes our place. If you want to live life as a cancer cell on the human race, you can expect it will react the same way we react to cancer in our own bodies.

This article is about this very problem. Advertisers are abusing the fact that our brains have not adapted to their schemes to trick people into spending their effort supporting not just the advertisers but the enterprises that advertise through them. They climb over the backs of their fellow man to selfishly guarantee their own survival, paying no mind to the consequences their actions bear for others and for the generations that follow us.

> What would we have accomplished if we survive until eternity without being happy?

Doing what we are here to do. Life exists because the universe had latent potential that unthinking matter could not release. The whole universe is working to exhaust its potential. Intelligent life is just another step in that process.

You also don't seem to get what happiness is. Happiness is not a state of ecstatic joy, it's a state of contentment, free of threats and concerns, when you can be at peace. Like all emotion and sensation, we have them because they were useful to our survival. Mental reward mechanisms don't exist because you can't be conscious without them, they exist because without them survival is more difficult. Happiness is always a temporary, illusory, and fleeting feeling. There will always be more mountains to climb, happiness just rewards us for getting to the next peak.

You can choose to live a willfully ignorant life and pretend to be confused just to feel better, or you can see what the world is telling you and listen to it.

It's not my decree, it's nature's. The world does not have infinite resources. We have to be careful how we use them.

If you cannot live efficiently, you will exhaust your available resources and your lifestyle will die out. Humans have put in a great amount of effort in the last few hundred years to make as many resources as possible available to use, but this only encouraged us to use more. If you want to see how to live life efficiently, look at present and past cultures that do. They seem to be plenty happy living on much less than the average person in the first world.

You don't exist to be happy, you exist to survive. What would we have accomplished as humans if after thousands of generations of working to build a world with more possibility if all that work is dashed by a bunch of greedy, selfish idiots who think pleasure is more important than the sustainability of human life?

There are so many other ways to escape, something virtually everyone needs to do at some point, that don't require someone else's time and effort to do. There are even productive ways to escape, like sports (can keep you healthy). If your escape detracts from essential efforts, it is counter-productive.

You aren't free to ignore them. To even look at them to identify whether they are advertisements takes time. Even if it took a millisecond, with a billion people looking at it that's 12 days of man-hours lost on every advertisement.

Pamphlet distribution is peer-to-peer. People have to distribute them to other people. However, Advertising is usually lopsided: typically a group of people working together, like a magazine corporation, or a machine, like with Facebook, is distributing content to people. And again, receiving ads from these places is not voluntary. You cannot engage with the activity but refuse receiving advertisements, unlike my experience of walking around on university campuses and refusing pamphlets I am offered.

Entertainment and relaxation are necessary, you are right. However, both can be done in ways that are at best productive and at least not-counterproductive.

Entertainment does not have to unproductive. People who play sports or do other recreational activities are working to maintain their physical health while having fun. There are games of all sorts you can play to help you improve life skills or even physical and mental abilities.

If your relaxation requires someone else's work, it is counter productive (think resort-type venues that need staff to operate). There are plenty of ways to relax and unwind that don't take away from other people's efforts. Visiting a nature park or a museum, for example. The work to maintain natural resources or to educate and inspire people is necessary beyond simply pleasing people.

We only tell our selves we can afford. The truth is we are constantly putting off work that needs to be done as if some future generation will fix all these problems.

There are tens of millions of Americans living in homelessness, shanty towns, and trailer parks. We need to build housing (apartments, homes) for them. No individual person can do that. We have to organize ourselves to tackle these kinds of problems cooperatively. However, our society insists that we allow the market to organize our activities.

The market is controlled by exchange, and people who can afford to exchange more than anyone else can control the market. The majority of our wealth is concentrated in the hands of a minority of people. Thus the market mostly organizes people to solve their concerns while paying no mind to people who cannot afford to engage with it.

Either you can fix the market (something arguably impossible to do) or you can use a different method of organizing humans into cooperative efforts.

Why do I have to let a company consume my time and mental memory? Why does anyone? Why are we as a society accepting the continued robbery of our time, attention, and thinking?

> It's been dishonest since the start. Criers lying about the effectiveness of some tonic, the attractiveness of some woman, the strength and wisdom of some leader.

If those are harmful practices, why would someone turn them into a business venture? To profit off of evil? Making something into a profitable business does not cleanse an activity of morality.

There is also a significant difference between saying you have found a magic bullet for all illnesses and saying you have discovered a specific treatment for specific diseases and had the treatment studied by independent experts to characterize its positive and negative effects in detail. Trying to convince people they need something (advertising) is manipulative, but informing people of something they might need is not.

You are not immune to propaganda. No one is.

There is a difference, whose significance seems to be lost on you, between peer-to-peer, voluntary communication and centralized, forced distribution.

You are not forced to read pamphlets nor do they insert the content of the pamphlets into your newspapers and letters. Typically the only thing you are forced to do by someone distributing pamphlets is to tell them whether you'd like to take one. If advertisements had to ask whether you wanted to see them, the entire industry would collapse.

Pamphlets are also not magically distributed to everyone. People have to decide to help distribute them, which means other people have to cooperate with you to help you spread your message. It is also easier for others to interfere in your efforts, as, unlike online, people can see who and where the information is coming from, and they can also more easily and directly inhibit distribution. On the other hand, any individual can buy a Facebook ad and, with enough money, shove it in millions of people's faces with little to no oversight. Hence, it is easier to spread misinformation (like anti-vaccine propaganda) through Facebook than in real life.