Researchers find inverse correlation between advertising and life satisfaction
I&#x27;m gonna take the contrarian viewpoint here. Full disclosure: I&#x27;m in advertising.<p>The researcher states that increasing &quot;aspiration&quot; (their term) leads to dissatisfaction and more unhappiness. Sure! But aspiration is also why we invented the wheel, harnessed fire, founded fancy schools like Harvard, try to be good parents, etc. I don&#x27;t disagree that ambition and aspiration can make a person unhappy. But it&#x27;s also what drives literally all human progress.<p>So unless you believe primitive man was living their best life and that everything that has happened since then is a regression (and certainly some people hold that view), I find it hard to swallow that aspirations are a bad thing.<p>Yes, there&#x27;s a negative to them. But virtually every good thing people have ever done was because of their aspirations.<p>Therefore I don&#x27;t agree with the notion that advertising is inherently bad because it raises people&#x27;s expectations for themselves. I consider that a good thing even if it comes at the cost of a decrease in personal happiness.<p>HOWEVER (I can feel your hatred), there&#x27;s a difference between motivating people to aspire to better things vs simply making them feel shitty about themselves so they&#x27;ll buy your crap.<p>ex: When a fashion brand shows impossibly attractive people wearing their clothes, they&#x27;re not showing us how to live better lives. They&#x27;re simply making us feel shitty for not being models, and then hoping we&#x27;ll make the conclusion that we&#x27;d look better if we bought those clothes. That doesn&#x27;t make anyone&#x27;s life better. That&#x27;s just a shit sandwich all around.<p>ex: When a tech company shows us a bunch of people being really productive using their products, it can inspire us to want to be more productive. If their product truly can make us more productive (like the invention of the PC... no reasonable person would argue that PCs didn&#x27;t make us more productive, right?), then that&#x27;s great.<p>ex: Pharmaceutical drugs have been a fantastic boon for humanity. We rely on them constantly to extend our lives and improve our quality of life. Yet some (many?) drugs are nowhere near as beneficial as they are advertised (I&#x27;m looking at you, Fentanyl).<p>So I think the question is simply: does the product actually improve our lives in the way the advertising suggests? Or is it just a bait-and-switch?<p>Advertising isn&#x27;t inherently bad, any more than aspirations are inherently bad. It boils down to what&#x27;s being advertised and how honest the ads are about it.