If you could un-invent something, what would it be?

Ads!

You wake up. An ad plays in your dream-fogged mind – something about breakfast cereal with extra fiber. You check your phone. Three ads scroll past before you can read the morning news.

Remember when our attention wasn’t for sale? When a YouTube video just played without interruption? When games were just… games, not delivery systems for “special offers”? When our personal conversations weren’t mined for targeted marketing?

Ads didn’t start out as invasive parasites feeding on our attention spans. Early advertisements simply said “Hey, I made this soap” or “Fresh bread sold here.” But like a virus adapting to its host, advertising evolved. It learned to bypass our rational minds and tap directly into our desires, fears, and insecurities.

Now they’re everywhere – woven so deeply into the fabric of our daily lives that we barely notice their suffocating presence. They’ve colonized every space, physical and digital. They track our movements, predict our wants, and reshape our needs. Our kids can recognize brand logos before they can read their own names.

The true cost isn’t just the money we spend on things we don’t need. It’s the way ads have warped our inner landscape. They’ve trained us to see ourselves as incomplete, always needing one more product to be happy, successful, worthy. They’ve turned our discontent into profit.

But here’s what the advertisers don’t want us to realize: we were whole to begin with. Our worth isn’t measured in products. Our happiness doesn’t come in packages. The best things in life – a child’s laugh, a friend’s embrace, a moment of peace – have never needed a sales pitch.

Some might argue that ads support “free” content. But nothing supported by ads is truly free – we pay with fragments of our consciousness, with pieces of our peace of mind.

What could our collective creativity accomplish if it wasn’t constantly bent toward selling things?