“In a simpler time, advertising merely called attention to the product and extolled its advantages. Now it manufactures a product of its own: The consumer; perpetually unsatisfied, restless, anxious, and bored. It ‘educates’ the masses into an unappeased appetite not only for goods but for new experiences and personal fulfillment. It upholds consumption as the answer to the age-old discontents of loneliness, sickness, weariness, and lack of sexual satisfaction and at the same time creates new forms of discontent peculiar to the modern age. It plays seductively to the malaise of industrial civilization. Is your job boring and meaningless? Is your life empty? Consumption promises to fill the aching void.”
– Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism.
William Dare 