[Zeklandia]

If you have to tell people they need something then they don't need it. Escape rooms are an entertainment luxury. When there is essential work that needs to be done (infrastructure, healthcare, education, &c.), it makes sense that it takes psychological manipulation to convince people that what they really need to do with their time and effort is temporary entertainment. If you want more customers, provide something that people find more necessary, like childcare.

[therealdrag0]

But we live in a culture that can afford entertainment luxury, if people don't find this gals business, they will spend that time on Netflix or at a bar instead.. The zero-sum game you propose is not really close to what would happen without advertising imo.

[Zeklandia]

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.

[dragonsngoblins]

Even with absolutely 0 advertising I probably wouldn't be working to build apartments for the homeless. Sure maybe I'm not seeing some movie, or buying some piece of chocolate I heard discovered through advertising but in that case I'm going to be spending my time watching/reading/playing/indulging in various other hobbies and vices and any money I would otherwise have spent I'd be saving.

Absolutely no benefit to future generations or my fellow man, and I'd assume the case to be true of most people. It isn't as if advertising has made me more callous or lazy.

Unless your point is that companies could be doing those things instead of spending ad dollars, but that is a ridiculous proposition because they'd be using it to make more capital in some other way

[wpietri]

You believe these things about yourself, but it's not like you have much evidence, so maybe consider the alternatives.

One function of advertising is demand generation. It makes people believe they need things they don't. The broad message of most ads is "spend more money to be successful/popular/happy". Is it really impossible to think that if people stopped getting told that all day long they'd focus less on spending/consumption and more on other things?

[therealdrag0]

Well yes, but that doesn't mean those "other things" are not entertainment related. I am not a very lavish spender myself. I rarely buy things and have ad-block on every platform I use. However, I read books, or exercise, or hangout with friends and discuss theoretical topics. My lack of major participation in consumerism, doesn't de facto lead me to become a saintful servant. Everyone is different, but one of my key drivers is mental stimulation; this is a big reason I read so much and advertising has nothing to do with that.

[chipotle_coyote]

Your argument sounds an awful lot like "how dare you do anything escapist when there are big problems in the world."

[Zeklandia]

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.

[ehmish]

No it's more that I'd your product fulfills a real need, people will find you. The fact that people don't without advertising says it isn't a real need.

[chipotle_coyote]

There's just a lot of presumptions buried in statements like this that I have trouble getting past. What criteria do we use to establish a need is "real" once we get past life requirements? Do I need a better chair? A better keyboard? A more efficient car? A monthly rail pass? The criteria you and several other comments in this thread use seems to include "if you found out about it through an ad, it's not a real need," which is the original canonical definition of "begging the question."

[Zeklandia]

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.

[dwild]

> If you have to tell people they need something then they don't need it.

None of the ads we got say to anyone that they need it. No one thinks that they need it when they see it.

What the ads say is that we exist. When they look for entertainment, and the debate isn't about whether entertainment should or not exist, they see us in the search engine (which is ads financed). When they search for movie theater (which is not related to our business, so it's fair that Google doesn't show our business in the results), they see us.

Actually, it's not even possible trying to convince people that they need us, even if we would want to. We NEED to target people that want entertainment because that's already pretty expensive for us to do.

[Zeklandia]

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.

[andyburke]

Entertainment and relaxation are not unnecessary. Especially in our late capitalist civilizations.

[randcraw]

True, but because all ads are spread via media, and interrupt the experience of enjoying that movie, song, paper or magazine or book, the delivery of every ad inevitably lessens your enjoyment of whatever activity they interrupt.

Nobody chooses to watch a TV or radio show that's all ads. Ads are the opposite of entertainment, otherwise we'd tune in Wednesday at 8 PM to watch our favorite ads.

[Zeklandia]

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.

[solipsism]

All entertainment must be productive? That's what you would decree? Ugh, very free people would want to live in your horrible nanny state.

[Zeklandia]

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?

[solipsism]

You don't exist to be happy, you exist to survive

Speak for yourself. You exist to survive apparently, and what a meager and sad existence that seems to me. Good thing there's no authority telling us why we exist and we're each free to decide for ourselves.

What would we have accomplished as humans if...

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

The world does not have infinite resources. We have to be careful how we use them

"All fun must be productive" doesn't follow from that.

[Zeklandia]

> 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.