❥ This is one of Ten Conditions of Re;turn that I’ve built over a lifetime. Ways of seeing that, once felt, are difficult to switch off. Catch up here:
The 10 Conditions
Shut the Door · Discernment · Your Orbit · Re;connect · Re;ceive
Re;focus · Re;discover · Re;wild · Re;calibrate · Re;generate
My sweet husband mutes the television when I walk into the room.
He noticed what happens to my face when an ad comes on. A kind of grimace. Like the frequency in the room changed and my body registered it before I did.
We pay for Apple Music. We pay for YouTube Premium. Whatever tools exist to close the gap through which ads enter, we use them. The subscription costs less than what enters without one.
Ads are often offensive. Often unintelligent. But that’s not the real problem.
The real problem is what they assume about you: that your attention is available. That it can be interrupted. That your consciousness is inventory on a shelf, waiting to be purchased by the highest bidder for thirty seconds.
Between three and ten thousand ad exposures a day, depending on how you count. You consciously notice maybe a fraction. The rest slip in beneath awareness and consent. Still shaping what you want, how you feel about your body, what you believe you’re missing.
The violation isn’t the interruption. It’s the assumption that you were available in the first place.
The problem is so grave that they even demonstrated this at the Oscars this year. The host couldn't finish a single sentence without an ad cutting in.
It was a comedy bit. Barely.
When you finally close the gap... the first thing you notice is how loud the silence is. Then how quickly something else moves into the space. A thought that’s actually yours. A preference you’d buried under six thousand daily suggestions about what to want.
I’ve lived across cultures. Ads in each one taught me something different about what a society is willing to sell you... and how.
In Singapore and Taiwan, they seduce. Soft lighting, slow pans, an irresistible woman whispering beauty secrets in a silk slip. In Indonesia, they go loud and absurd... comedy, jingles that cling to your brain, characters that border on ridiculous but stay relatable. In Australia, they’re shouty and blokey. The kind of ad that yells at you about half-price tyres, delivered at full volume by someone in hi-vis. In America, they sell you medicine... for conditions you didn’t know you had, with side effects read faster than your brain can process. And don’t worry… you can pay for it later.
Different frequencies. Same assumption. Your attention is available for rent.
Now imagine something. What if Facebook and Instagram weren’t built on ads? The algorithm wouldn’t need to maximise your engagement... because your attention wouldn’t be the product. Less rage bait. Less comparison. Less of that scroll that empties you without knowing why. What if Google didn’t sell your search to the highest bidder? You’d get the most relevant answer, not the most sponsored one. The entire architecture of the platforms we live inside was designed to serve advertisers. Not you.
I’ve come to believe... after three decades of building brands, living across cultures, watching how the machine speaks to different people differently... that if you removed advertising from daily life, a significant portion of what we struggle with would begin to soften.
Body image. Overconsumption. The nagging, low-grade feeling that what you have isn’t quite enough. That you should be thinner, richer, further along. These aren’t human conditions. They’re manufactured ones. And the factory has been running on your attention this entire time.
I wrote this in Chapter 4
And we’re not innocent bystanders. We chose the convenience. We pressed the lever too — knowingly, willingly, gratefully at first. The system didn’t force its way in.
We left the door open and it learned our name.
It’s time to shut the door.
Shutting the door is the first condition because everything else depends on it. You cannot hear your own signal when someone else’s broadcast is filling the room.
Rare Attention™ begins here. In protecting what was already yours.
✷ Practice — three parts:
First, observe. For one day, pay attention to the ads. On TV, YouTube, Spotify, your social feed... anywhere. Make a tally. What keeps appearing? Soft drinks. Insurance. Fast food. Pharmaceuticals. Supplements. Betting apps. Online courses. Buy-now-pay-later. Write them down. At the end of the day, look at your list and ask one question: is any of this something I would ever need?
Then, question. When one catches you — when you feel the pull — ask yourself what it assumed about you. What gap it thought you had.
Then, shut the door. The next day, close every gap you can find. Pay for the ad-free version. Mute them out. Skip the sponsored content. Sit with what arrives in the quiet... and notice what didn’t need to arrive at all.
❥ I want to hear what you found. Drop your tally in the comments — what were the ads selling, and where are you from? I’m endlessly curious about how the pitch changes depending on who’s listening... and where.
❥ Who ads are actually built for... and who they’ve quietly stopped targeting... is a conversation arriving soon.
If this already changed how you see a single ad today, you’re only seeing the edge of it. The full map of all ten conditions — the diagram, the deeper territory — lives inside the paid edition.
Darling Anliette, silence is not only loud but highly addictive (in a healthy way)😅🤍I am on the same page, if i can pay for ads free, I do..My peace is of a high value 🙃😋Warmest greetings Kx
Really good tips Anliette! That comedy bit is gold - sums up the issue in a nutshell.
Given the vested interests and billions of dollars spent by advertisers and technology to encourage us to follow the herd (and buy things we don’t really need…) - any advice to help us all be more deliberative and thoughtful can only be of benefit 🙂