You mean, the basic logic of kids in preschool who only want the toy some other kid is playing with? Yes, the world is full of sheep dazed by the sheer complex

You mean, the basic logic of kids in preschool who only want the toy some other kid is playing with? Yes, the world is full of sheep dazed by the sheer complexity and cacophony of the modern world. It's very hard to make logical decisions about every part of your life, instead people glom onto templates to follow. It's just a lot easier. Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a good, interesting idea. Maybe "wanting" the book has deeper ideas... But it's hilarious the thread name-drops Peter Thiel in a SF-focused thread about wanting things only because prominent people have/want them, when it's basically advocating for deciding your own way. One of the inherent parts of humanity the social animal is belonging. People do many things subconsciously simply to belong. Our world is utterly insane. We are headed towards an environmental disaster if you do the smallest amount of research or thought, and yet a strict environmental lifestyle is viewed as, at best, eccentricity. No one is happy it seems, yet everyone buys into the same materialistic sales campaigns and keeps doing the same thing over and over to try to make themselves happy, the colloquial definition of insanity. The amazing invention of marketing in the 20th-21st centuries is that marketing unlocked people tautologically and defensively want because other people want. By highlighting that everyone wants and hoards, it makes everyone defensively hoard, because we all evolved in resource scarcity, so seeing people hoard triggers us all to hoard defensively.