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Let's not forget how advertising plays into this mentality. Advertising's sole purpose is to make you feel inferior/incomplete/inadequate without shiny new X. It's blasting at us constantly from every direction. Who is the most susceptible to it, those who are not struggling, or those who are? So they buy shiny new X, which is a bad financial decision.

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Advertising doesn't have a sole purpose. One purpose is to make you aware of the existence of a good or service. Another is to persuade you that you would be better off with that good or service than without it. One way of doing that, for some people maybe, is to instill a sense of inadequacy that only the good or service being advertised can cure, but this seems to me to be a small and rather ineffective minority of ads.

> Advertising's sole purpose is to make you feel inferior/incomplete/inadequate without shiny new X

I disagree with this. I’ve never felt "inadequate" because of an ad.

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