I hate being sold to, but I can’t seem to get away from advertisements. It wasn’t always like this. When I was young, my family didn’t have a TV. It was a geographical issue. Our house in the mountains couldn’t get the free TV signals, and we were too poor to afford cable. As a result, I got the ad-free version of childhood.
The only time I saw TV ads was when I visited Grandma and watched Saturday morning cartoons. They fascinated me at first. I wanted everything. After each commercial, I got a thrill of excitement about getting the toy followed by a death drop of disappointment when I remembered we had no money to buy it. I would never be able to get any of it. I resented the ads for tantalizing me with the impossible. Soon, Grandma turned off the TV and told us to go play. And that was the totality of my childhood ad experience.
Today, with the internet people see many thousands of ads per day. Every ad is trying to tickle your fancy, inject dissatisfaction with your life, raise a desire for something new, and get you to act now! Even if you don’t buy anything, you still pay a price. Each ad takes a little of your attention and time, like a time tax. If you are watching TV, you are losing twenty minutes per hour to ads. If you are online, you are losing a few seconds here, there, everywhere. Over the day, all those moments add up to more lost time than you think.
If the loss of time doesn’t bother you, consider that each ad interrupts your productive thoughts, like stop signs popping up randomly in the middle of the highway. Your brain pauses, shifts, and processes the message, deciding whether to move on or not. At the very least, we lose the time it takes to reengage with our work. That is an energy cost that we don’t realize we are paying.
As much as I hate being solicited, I have to admit that they are very effective! Companies buy and sell my metadata, so they can target me with the things I’m interested in. Advertisements influence me. Oh. Look at that! I didn’t know they made those. I wonder how that works? Look how beautiful that is. Look how cool that person is. Nudge. Nudge. Buy. Buy. Of course, ads are effective. Companies wouldn’t keep spending money on them if they didn’t bring in the sales. I like to think I am a sales-resistant person. I have a rule that I will never buy something from a salesman. From Girl Scout cookies to cars to vacuum cleaners. I refuse to be pressured into anything. But that doesn’t matter, because ads don’t pressure you. They manipulate. They remind you gently. The technique of influencing your thoughts is not difficult. Just plant the seed with an ad and it will stimulate future choices. It’s subtle and dangerous. They have it down to a science. They all want your money, your time, your attention, but you might not realize how much you are being manipulated. It’s time to reduce your ad exposure and take back your mind space.
