It's not just high school emotional blackmail, though that's a part of it. Billions of dollars are spent to scientific research and game people's psychology. On top of that billions of dollars are spent to then spread messages on massive scales that affect virtually everyone's thought process. It's social engineering in its truest sense.
The only way to see beyond it is to move to a place which is not affected by the same tools, say very very poor countries and see how different people's psychology is there. In Western civilization we are set up to be miserable from day one. Whether it's through the schooling process or workplace. It's a toxic environment and it is engineered to be that way. To sell more, to be more productive, and to drive everything in a very tight system.
It is a system which just like any other system serve itself much more than it serves the objects, humans, it administers. It encourages unstable mindsets and addictions.
A regular person sees about 5 hours of TV per day of which 30% is advertising. That is over an hour every day of messages telling you what you need to buy to be happy and where you need to travel, what kind of esthetic surgery to have, which car to drive, etc.
The main problem here is that the messages are disingenuous. They present the product being used by beautiful, smiling, sexy people, thus associating it with well being. We are constantly being told: you must get product X or visit country Y and your ego will be rewarded, more attractive, more successful. It's all about self image, how you see yourself. Very very insidious, because the self image is one of the most delicate and vulnerable parts of our psyche.
An opposite to watching ads would be to do mindfulness meditation and cleanse your mind of all this crap thoughts and fake values which are not in your best interest.
It's not as simple as hey I watched this ad and it told me to do this and I did or did not do it. Ads are narratives that create meaning. They in many ways define a sort of metaphysics of our world, a way in which we find meaning in who we are and what we do. They define us as people, society and civilization much like religion defined people in the Middle and Dark ages.
Ads are a one way conversation that the producers are having with the consumers. The other side of that is the actual production of the products, namely your jobs. Stuff you spend most of your life toiling away at. Ads are what it means to be human in the 20th and 21st century.
On the other hand, that technology and research is always going to be there. Let it loose in public and we can understand it, becoming naturally immune.
Is the alternative a naive public shielded from manipulative media? How long before that weakness is exploited, and by who?
The key to that immunity is education, of course. A little skepticism is all it takes to deconstruct any message with a motive.
You can become conscious of them, and then you can choose how you act.
The real question is, when does a person have free will? Ever? We consider people to be adults at some point. What that means is autonomous agents. I don't want to live under laws that do not assume this.
The only way to see beyond it is to move to a place which is not affected by the same tools, say very very poor countries and see how different people's psychology is there. In Western civilization we are set up to be miserable from day one. Whether it's through the schooling process or workplace. It's a toxic environment and it is engineered to be that way. To sell more, to be more productive, and to drive everything in a very tight system.
It is a system which just like any other system serve itself much more than it serves the objects, humans, it administers. It encourages unstable mindsets and addictions.