30 minutes with a stranger

I'm increasingly convinced that social isolation is the single great social ill of our time. I am not one for "respecting others' opinions" at all, make no mistakes, if someone believes something incorrect - or worse - then they need to be corrected. But so much of the hate simmering away like a pot about to boil over is the result of loneliness. The evidence on this is startingly clear.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235215462...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027795362...

https://www.psychiatrist.com/news/hate-lies-and-loneliness-f...

Had a chat about this with a friend yesterday.

In richer societies you can afford to be alone. This isn't good for tribal beings, humans didn't evolve as lone wolves. Even something as cooking for more than one person involves so much interaction.

At the lower end of the global income scale , you can't afford to be alone in your giant house. You might need to share communal goods.

Not everyone, but just having a role in society can be a major help for many people. The biggest crime of the modern era is the disposable human. You work for an anonymous corporation, that does some nonsense you can't even hope to understand, in exchange for currency, to support the basics of your existence.

You don't get to have any real status in that, for example In many places there was just one or two bread makers for the entire community. Baking bread isn't the most prestigious job, but you matter.

Tell me, fellow techy, working on serving ads. Who exactly would be disappointed if you failed in your duties today. Would anyone in your community be upset that they didn't get as many advertisements

I agree with 99.9% of what you wrote. It’s presented very clearly. We are social animals even if we don’t like to admit it.

A while ago I would say I agree 100%, but more recently I learned that ads have value. Therefore i can’t agree with the final sentence in this post. It’s not easy to recognize but I’d like to try to share how I see it now.

Any time you think or say one of these things, it means that someone did not do a good job advertising:

- I would have gone to that concert but did not know about it

- It was that cheap on sale? Too bad I did not hear about it a week ago.

- DeVaughn’s closed!? I completely forgot about that restaurant. They had great food.

- Why didn’t anyone tell me earlier that there is a tool for easily finding a time for a meeting.

Advertising can be valuable. When done right, it does not have to be intrusive or annoying. This does not mean that every job provides value, but not knowing about something can cause people to feel negatively. Marketing is telling people about things.

Ads are agents in a zero-sum war for your attention.

If you have focus, if you're not aimlessly wandering around, ads try to distract you. They attack your personal agency and sovereignty, trying to divert you from what you were doing, to pay attention to what they're pushing.

Because they're in a zero sum competition, the dynamics are to escalate. There's only so much inventory, and the winners of the bids for your attention need to have more and more effect on your behavior to justify the escalating costs. Text isn't enough, images are needed. Images aren't enough, videos are needed. Videos aren't enough, interstitials with tiny close buttons are needed, with mandatory pauses. If advertisers could reach out and physically grab you by the head, they would.

All of this is true for a large portion of web ads.

Then there is the ad for your kids' school fundraiser.

Or the ad for a used car that your cousin would love.

Or the poster for the concert at your local community hall.

These ads also are "trying to divert you from what you were doing, to pay attention to what they're pushing".

Yet these feel ads differently despite also being "agents in a zero-sum war for your attention".

I don't think people appreciate how much good and positive advertising exists because they are conditioned and on-guard for the kinds of ads that you describe.

You are deliberately confusing ads with things that already have better names, such as notices or listings. They feel different because they ARE different.

Advertising is wildly successful because it's literally everywhere and we are conditioned from birth that the whole concept of "strangers using psychological tricks so you give them your money" is just a normal fact of everyday life. Most people are NOT conditioned to be on-guard against ads, and that is the whole problem. It's not until you make the choice to actively avoid ads where possible and give up ad-laden media consumption altogether for a while that you notice how bad (and bad for you) advertising is.

If you haven't tried switching to a low-advertising diet, you are probably missing out on the ability to focus on what really matters in life.

I am taking a broader definition of ad to include things that also have other names.

- job ads and classified ads that can also be called listings

- ads for events that can also be called notices

- product description on services like Amazon and Ebay

- websites describing products and services

- 1st hand and 2nd hand mentions of products and services online that can be as close to the

Some of the comments here seem to hold only for a narrow definition of ads.

I prefer to think of all of this as marketing, as ads are part of the marketing mix. As we see, the distinction between ads and other similar things is blurry.

I am not defending the volume of ads. There's way too much of it. I am making the unconventional and unpopular statement that sometimes marketing and ads do deliver value.

It's better to narrow the critique of ads the way you did because that leads to a more constructive conversation.