Just some random thoughts here...this strikes me as a consequence of the contemporary idea of work having to be the end-all to one’s identity, purpose and meaning in life.
Advertising, perhaps the ‘original’ fundamentally meaningless career field to spawn from consumer capitalism, used to be mostly about just communicating your product/service. Eventually it morphed into lifestyle marketing and at this point has reached its ultimate conclusion: advertising workers themselves have drunk the Koolaid that used to only be peddled to consumers.
I wonder if we’ll ever see a return to simple “hey, we make this thing, you might find it useful.”
What you are already seeing is that advertising is baked into the product instead. I.e. the actual features, functionality or problem solved are themselves finding their ways to the right users.
It used to be that the advertisers used their control over the primarily one way distribution channels to promote their products.
Today it's the consumers who promote the products through the multiway channels and then only if you have exhausted most of your organic, social and viral growth channels do you promote through one-way channels again.
it's a redirection of the natural human characteristic of competitive behaviour and climbing hierarchies. Keeping challengers down and attempting to elevate ourselves in whatever hierarchy we find ourselves in is about as human as it gets, sadly.
If you have a grocery store that has cantaloupes, and that's unusual because most grocery stores don't have cantaloupes most of the time, you just hang a sign in the window that says "Cantaloupes". Maybe you put a print ad in the newspaper. Those who decide they want them will come to your store. When they're all gone, well, your advertising did its job.
But if every grocery store has cantaloupes year-round, you're not going to sell many extra cantaloupes by hanging a sign in your window. You need to get clever. And behold, advertising-as-hustle is born.
This is where it turns into tragedy of the commons. If every grocery store has cantaloupes year-round, they need to figure out something else to advertise, or - if they're all selling the same stuff - they should all shut up. Instead, someone will always start the advertising arms race, and suddenly everyone has to waste time and Earth's natural resources on actions that roughly cancel each other out.
I've been entertaining that view for a long time now wrt. advertising, but what other service job has the same characteristics? Namely, that your works serves mostly to undo the results of your peers' work, and vice versa?
I think medical insurance has a component like this. The doctor's office has people in it whose job is to make sure that the doctor gets paid, and the insurance company's office has people in it who try to find ways to not pay.
this seems accurate to me, although I would phrase it as competition rather than abundance. When everyone has the same product on offer, differentiation comes from how you position that product in the market. This trainer is for aspiring marathon runners, this one is for aspiring basketball players. The reality is the difference between the two is minimal and they're both just trying to focus on selling to the subset of people with a particular self-image.
> the contemporary idea of work having to be the end-all to one’s identity, purpose and meaning in life.
This is something that bothers me a lot. The default answer to any question about who we are is something like "Ohh, I'm a $profession, I work for $company."
I suppose it's an easy ice breaker, but it is so rarely interesting or relevant.
I like riding BMX and Mountain Bikes, being outdoors, building stuff, and have some interest in open source/free culture. Those things are only at best tangentially related to my actual career in IT.
Personally I don't think that is new at all. Farmers have long identified as farmers above all else, sailors as sailors - and that isn't even getting into cushy positions like the warrior-elites.
>> advertising workers themselves have drunk the Koolaid that used to only be peddled to consumers
Please don't blame the victim. The slaves have no choice, they have to dance like their masters require them to. The "choice" to quit their jobs simply doesn't exist since there are fewer and fewer jobs for more and more hungry and desperate poor (payed just to live to another paycheck, making sure they end up in the streets should they put up some resistance at the pressure to dance as they are told).
I'll call bullshit or your victim mentality shtick.
First, things like "at-will employment", which is an offensive term in itself, is pretty much collectively "the workers" fault, since you just vote to not have that, and while you're at it, better labour laws also (see Europe). While we're at collective bargaining, it could be something as simple as everybody in the office agreeing not working past 5pm, or at the other extreme, unionisation.
The reason neither of these things happens is largely self-centred narcissists who ruin it for everybody, because either they can only think of themselves and not others (e.g. if you're single and don't mind staying late vs somebody has kids), or less charitably, they thought of others and then did it anyway. IMO here's the money quote:
> To be clear, hustle isn’t just hard work — it’s showing that you’re working hard.
Of course it is -.-
Edit: Before you say it doesn't work, or doesn't work in the US, consider some of the unions in the US, including the Screen Actors Guild.
Advertising, perhaps the ‘original’ fundamentally meaningless career field to spawn from consumer capitalism, used to be mostly about just communicating your product/service. Eventually it morphed into lifestyle marketing and at this point has reached its ultimate conclusion: advertising workers themselves have drunk the Koolaid that used to only be peddled to consumers.
I wonder if we’ll ever see a return to simple “hey, we make this thing, you might find it useful.”