Ads aren't about products. They're about how we'll feel about ourselves if we pop for them. Products are pretty much identical, so ads compete as cures for boredom and inner emptiness. Often they create, and then assuage, anxiety. "Everybody thinks you smell like a rendering plant. Wash with Dial and they'll stop whispering behind your back…."

What happened was, three hundred years ago nobody had anything, except goiter and tuberculosis, because the economy wasn't invented, and so everybody wanted a washer-dryer and refrigerator. You didn't have to advertise. People knew they wanted things. They just couldn't figure out how to get them. There was more demand than supply.

Then inventors figured out how to make more of anything anybody wanted, and more of things it was almost impossible to want, than anybody in his right mind would buy. (That may have been a sentence. If it isn't it's because it had a bad childhood. Maybe its mother got too close to the radium watch with the slugs on it.) So useless junk started piling up and threatening to crush things. Home Depot lost a factory they couldn't find under a mound of battery-powered drills.