Advertisements

Our mendal bandwidth is stolen through the use of pervasive advertisement, well beyond the hypothetical benefit that might come from it. Mental exhaustion makes it difficult to make decisions, and I believe advertisers know this and knowingly try to weaken consciousness, which obviously has reprecussions outside of your buying habits, and conceivably could affect your ability to make good decisions in many domains of your life, including health.^^1, 2^^

For this reason I think it is fundamental for general success to minimize interaction with advertisements. The use of adblockers on computers is important until advertisements are removed organically, and advertisments should be outlawed in public places, including on clothing. It is extremeley difficult for me to imagine a downside to this approach, except that, at a glance, I won't be able to tell what brand the shoes of a stranger on the street is wearing.

If you want advertisements, we should act as our own personal "cookie," recording our browsing habits, and then, for example, if we wanted to be advertised to about what shoes we like, we could choose to share some of our browsing habits related to shoes, and then go specifically to a billboard site that would use the information we shared to give us deals/recommendations/encouragement. In this way advertisers wouldn't get wholesale access to our browsing information and personal information (as the current model supports), and we only get ads when we go looking for them, not in the middle of a life-altering historical news article.

Additionally, there might be some legal/technical mechanism to limit how much companies can spend on advertising, so that crappy brands can't just pay for your eyes, but after some ceiling is met on advertising budget, more important factors like reviews, quality, etc come in to play, all aspects of a product much more important than the advertising budget of the parent company in the outcome of whether we should buy a product or not.

This actually now is beginning to sound like part of a larger move to make mindless consumption illegal, which we should do for our mental and emotional wellbeing, as well as for the sake of waste and the future of the planet. Right now only one party is being catered to, the corporations hoping to make money. Why would we optimize our entire global civilization around them?

1 Citation about how tired people do more drugs or something.

2 Anecdote about how hard it is to exercise when you are mentally exhausted.