I watched this life changing documentary last week titled “The Century of the Self.” Not sure if anyone here has seen it. It’s opened my eyes to the fact that all of modern day consumerism and desire based consumption was engineered on purpose by business owners working in tandem with psycho-analysts in 1900s. They knew how to tap into our primal desires for sex, status, power, etc. to get us to buy buy buy… and then buy some more, and they acted on this knowledge to create emotional advertisement. Back in the day companies would sell us to us based on the benefits of their products, using logic. Now, they prey upon our fears and desires, often times subliminally. It leads us to buy not from a place of calm and calculated rationality, but from impulsiveness and irrationality. It makes us over spend, lust after things things we don’t need, and harms the environment from all of the extra waste that is generated.
Looking around at the advertising and consumeristic beliefs corporations are trying to sell us on on a regular basis, I can tell this form of advertising isn’t going away any time soon. If anything, the corporations look like they’re doubling down with each passing year as they perfect their cold science of motivating us to act in line with their business interests to make their wallets bigger...
“TV advertising revenue was forecast to grow from 73 billionU.S. dollars in 2016 to around 75 billion U.S. dollars in 2017 and 82billion in 2020”
“Digitaladvertising spending is forecast to increase from nearly 60 billionU.S. dollars in 2015 to around 83 billion U.S. dollars in 2017.”
Source:https://www.statista.com/topics/979/...ing-in-the-us/
If anyone is interested in the documentary here it is (you won’t bedisappointed):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04