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.