🎨 TREE 249: Advertising is (better when it’s) dumb
One.
Curtis is king of several things on Thursdays. One of them is this majestic tree.
Two.
Advertising is not based on what I want or need. It’s based on what businesses want to sell me. Its job is to manipulate – to create desire for a product whether I need it or not. I do not need 99.9% of the products that exist. For the things I do need, I have a Google and I know how to use it.
Advertising is impossible to avoid but I do specific things to drastically reduce its influence on my life:
I cultivate the mindset that advertisers are concerned with acquiring my money not with enhancing my growth and wellbeing.
I practice ignoring ads. I actively don’t look as I scroll past. I actively don’t click when they catch my attention. (Honesty box: sometimes they are interesting and I do click.)
When I can’t ignore an ad, I try to notice the story it is telling me. When you pay attention, you see a lot of laughable lies.
I make the ads I see online as irrelevant as possible. The more companies know about me, the more leverage they have to manipulate my greedy monkey mind into craving what they are selling. I want them to know as little as possible.
iPhone users, make sure this is off:
Make your Google ads dumb:
Let Facebook use as little of your information as possible:
Tell Amazon no:
The brain space you don’t give to advertising is space that you have for growing.
Three.
Doesn’t matter if you need it or not
Doesn’t matter to me ’cause you’re all the same
Grow slowly faster without interruptions
Jeff