That's the caveat of an unsustainable retain ecomomy. Boom and bust consumerism keeps the economy afloat before the bubble pops and the banks re-inject credit into the economy. Notice the uptick in banking and credit card advertisements? That's not a coincidence. You got bills to pay, so you're going to work, work, work everyday. REAL Catholics (not Jesuits) understand this as the antithesis to Christ. That life should not be a debt to credit — merely working under the wage slave system. Life is more than just work. It is to better ourselves spiritually, religiously and strive to help others less fortunate than ourselves. But this becomes a rarer and rarer occurrence when entertainment takes up lay time, if one even has such time. And even if one works tirelessly to achieve his or her goal of property ownership, a cyclical doldrum could rob that person of what he earned with his hands. As someone who worked in agriculture, I can tell you from first hand experience, that the city capitalists and neoliberals hate the the self-sustaining farmer and have sought to burden this sector with debt and poverty. There's been an epidemic of food stamps in the farming community for this very reason, despite farmers working from sunrise to sunset.

Countries like Spain have made billboards illegal. I think this is the type of thinking is good. We need to get away from this swamp of advertising and communications system abuse (and the resulting emotional abuse from all the scams and so on) that we're all become mired in. I think it's a very serious problem that's basically being completely ignored in the public discourse. Basically because the public discourse is being led by those same communications networks. They'd never rat themselves out to the public.

Sure, that is a great idea but in the US the purse gets the final say. Big money will not allow their advertisements to be thwarted because it might help ease the mental illness plight. In fact, over spending is something they desire not only for the products they sell but for the economy as a whole.

Deep down inside, if everyone awoke to consumerism and rejected materialism, focusing more on self-sustainability and spirituality, the entire economy would collapse. The people in power today, if that were to happen, would fund all kinds of revolutionary action to thwart grassroots movements.

But again, it's our individual choices that matter most. For if we can reject such consumerism, so cannot someone you know. Unfortunately, with the advent of TV and social media, stupid trends rule the airwaves.

It's a bizarre problem that humanity faces at this moment in history.

Indeed, and alien to our evolution. Unfortunately, most would reject such immaterialism.

We almost need a revolution of our communications systems, to remake it for the public good rather than for advertising and scammers to abuse like it's the wild west.

Foremost would be to revoke streamlining federal laws to towns. Second would be to have town corp. have open source decentralized paper ballot voting. I think all such communitarian ideas for the purpose of society as a whole should start locally. The consensus today is that federal law, easily lobbied by the interests of big money, can supersede town law. And even today the laws of the town corporation are highly centralized and rely on the dreaded mammonistic budget view. The state then increases direct and indirect taxes to pay off that interest.

The saturation of misuse of these systems has become unstable, bad effects are bound to happen because of how it affects people psychologically and how it affects how they view communication.

Consider the aspirations of the WEF and world governor alliance. Yes, our own governors are part of an international agenda. The entire responsible stakeholder schtick is to open up niche markets where humans thought no man should go. That is to make you and I and our bodies and health a commodity to be traded on markets and profited off of. That is the real goal of 5g, IoT, the 4th industrial revolution — processes which could have benefited humanity. Endless 'progress' (devolution) for the interests of big capital and the Malthusian doctrinists all rapped up in responsible stakeholder capitalism. In the end, it will suck everyone dry and there will be nothing left but to seek a higher power, something immaterial.

That is their goal, no? By 2030, "you'll own nothing, have no privacy and be happy!" Hopefully, nobody buys into that viewpoint because this consumer culture we have now, will be transformed into a dystopian rentiers' crazy house, where data generation will monopolize the movement of money.

It's a very bad problem that at its worst may result in many global cultures being hijacked with the intent to destroy/reshape them, but many people can't see the full scope of the issue.

One big international family under consumerism and materialism forever. It's like the movie They Live. They know you don't need it but they tickle your senses so that you desire to have it. I'm sure they use other techniques like the head to skull invention, which I believe they had installed somewhere in NYC for sometime, which would use specific-frequencies to sell you things but it sounded like the ad was emanating from your head rather than from a loud speaker far away. Scary stuff. I think more and more people see through all of this but then again I'm not so sure because less and less people read, if at all. I came to have this viewpoint because of Church friends and because of Jesus.