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Comment by gglitch | Hacker News Reader

"Maybe it is because I don’t allow any advertising at all into my life..." ...How does he manage this? Advertising and marketing have become a major, major, nearly pathological personal issue for me, to such an extent that I sometimes fantasize, on the train on the way to work, for example, about the ability to temporarily turn off my ability to read.

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No TV, no radio, a pretty heavy assortment of ad blockers for my browsers and I refuse to visit people that won't switch off their TV when they have guests or I leave if they don't. Yes, that's rude. No, I don't care. If TV is more interesting than real life people then the real life people have the option to go elsewhere.

Out of curiosity, do you not watch TV series or movies (on a monitor), or is it just cable TV that you don't watch? What about popular music, news, video games and other cultural expressions that all subtly promote materialism?

Movies from the net, popular music: what my friends recommend + a collection I built up over a lifetime of buying CDs and LPs, news: nu.nl (no ads there with adblock+ghostery+some tweaks), don't play video games and I don't know what other cultural expressions that promote materialism would be, specifics would help here. Product placement in movies is hard to avoid but super easy to spot, I make a point of not buying anything advertised in that way if I come across it.

It's actually not that hard. I very rarely see advertising, and I didn't even make a conscious effort to do it.

I don't have a TV, I don't listen to the radio, I don't read magazines or newspapers, I pay a subscription for all the streaming services I use and I use ad-blockers when browsing the internet.

None of these are conscious choices to avoid advertisements - I would do all of them even if they didn't have that pleasant side effect.

The only time I see advertisements is when I take public transport - the underground in London is full of them, but they're pretty easy to tune out.

You sound much like me w/regard to advertising and not seeing any of it. This has probably saved me $100K or more over the years simply by not being enticed to buy/lease new cars. I have a 2000 truck and a 1997 Miata, both bought used and kept well-maintained, and I'm perfectly happy with them. I'm not sure if that would be the case, the happy part that is, if I was constantly exposed to new-car-porn. I see beautiful new or newish cars all around me, and not just in the "nice" areas, in a city with a below-average income profile. It's hard to fathom how people both will, and can spend so much money, on very expensive, depreciating assets, most likely using borrowed money.

Advertising and its emotional manipulations have become extremely powerful, and between TV and the internet, most people are probably exposed to more minutes of it per day than ever before. If you can't fight its power, avoiding it entirely is a sound strategy.

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