There Are No Advertisements Thrust in Your Face When Reading a Book

As an experiment I joined Instagram after a five year absence. This time around I limited the app in every way it allowed: private membership with request only followers, minimal posting, rare engagement in the form of likes. A few months later I have 37 posts (mostly random feel good statements, some shots of my latest book announcement, some pics of Wichita), 43 followers (every single one is someone I know in the real world) and have followed 95 accounts (again, people I know).

In a quick scroll this morning I encountered an ad for something for every two or three posts from accounts I follow. Ads for t-shirts designed to make fat dudes look less fat, Apple watch bands, teeth whitening gadgets, sockless shoes, faux vintage ballcaps, the ‘belt that sold out 3x,’ rugged men’s rings, wallets, and jeans that are made of stretchy material.

IG gives you the option to hide specific ads but not block all of them carte blanche.

It’s always irrelevant.

For the honeymoon back in 2015, the third ex-wife and I took the holiday in Jamaica. Unless we were in one of those gated beaches, we were mobbed by people trying to sell bullshit to tourists. “Can I say something, man?” was the opener each fifth step down the street and eventually, after being delayed and annoyed, my ex-wife thinking that this was an opportunity to blend in and converse with the folks who lived on the island, I became that guy—“No. No, you cannot say something! I’m not listening!” with a dismissive wave of my hand.

She was embarrassed by my very American-ness and would hang back and try to adopt their accent, apologizing for her troglodyte husband. I was frustrated that these natives of the island had no interest in being her friend because she was the mark.

“Hey. This guy says he can take us around the island in his car for thirty bucks. Wanna go?”

“Sure. And when he wants an additional thirty to take us back, that’ll be like fucking Easter Sunday.”

I’ve been the mark too many times to avoid suspicion of anyone trying to sell me something I didn’t ask for in the first place.

Personal branding is just our best way to market ourselves to fool those we contact into buying into an image we want to project. It’s the ‘new & improved’ and ‘organically sourced’ of the masks we choose to wear in order to make money or gain status. At this point online dating is no different from the parade of pharmaceutical commercials run on network news that claim that despite your crippling pulmonary disease, you can take a pill (that will include as side effects suicidal ideation, addiction, and unceasing anal weeping) that will allow you to play with children in a park joyously.

It’s merely a different form of marketing and advertising which is synonymous with hiding the flaws, amplifying the benefits, and magnifying the lies to get some hapless consumer—of stuff, of medicine, of love—to pull the trigger and buy.

At some point the sights and sounds of marketing began affect me in the same way that chewing on tinfoil or armpit hair on a pretty woman does. I can barely hang on when watching any network television and, while I tend to get to the movie theater in order to catch the trailers (I know that’s a disconnect because trailers are ads) I kinda wanna burn Maria Menounos at the stake for her acid-like laugh and enthusiastic pitching of bullshit to trapped audiences.

Most streaming films I can enjoy ad-free but that will soon end as Big Tech is realizing they can’t make enough dough with subscriptions. YouTube? Gimme a break. Podcasts? Only Smartless makes it remotely entertaining as they joke through their endorsements.

Advertising comes as a part of our need for entertainment and I suppose there is something to be said that our never quite satiated hunger for more stories and distraction from the issues of the world comes with a road block, a bump in the moment of zen. On the other hand there are books.

I can sit down in my incredibly comfortable $25 church garage sale recliner and crack open a book and encounter an absolute zero in terms of being subjected to marketing. Not one single interruption of the flow of either nonfiction information or narrative story by someone waving his arms and throwing out “Can I say something, man?” No grift, no posturing, no sales point.

I’m sure the locusts of marketing tried to figure out a hack to inject books with advertising but failed. It’s almost as if the simplicity of the written word on a page of physical paper is impervious to the harpies trying convince you that you can shred your belly fat if only you eat the foods they recommend and, if you don’t, you’ll live your life in fat, sloppy loneliness.

It’s a beautiful, solitary endeavor and a reminder that not everything is for sale.