I don’t experience mass-market ads in my day-to-day life at all. None in person: I live in a rural town of under a hundred people, and the nearest billboard I k

I don’t experience mass-market ads in my day-to-day life at all. None in person: I live in a rural town of under a hundred people, and the nearest billboard I know of is 40km away on the sides of a fish-and-chips shop, and the second-nearest over 100km away. (Also one road safety billboard (TAC) 45km in a different direction, but that’s at least a bit different.) None in tech or other things, either: no newspaper, radio or TV, nothing on mobile (which I barely use anyway), aggressive ad-blocker and JS disabled by default in Firefox. Just occasionally (considerably less than once a year) I get exposed to TV (which I was not raised with). It’s awful. How does anyone ever willingly subject themselves to it? I detest televisions. They’re far too effective at stealing your attention, distracting you, et cetera, and their ads are regularly just sickening from the rapidity of transitions and visual stimuli. Fairly regularly I go down to Melbourne (where I grew up), mostly by public transport but sometimes driving. Ugh. So many billboards, so many things trying to steal your attention (and designed to steal your attention), so many such things even actively causing safety hazards while driving (especially at night). A lot of current billboard practices should be made illegal as part of road safety laws, quite apart from anything else. Almost all of these practices, I will add, have come about in in the last ten years, mostly even in the 5½ years since I left Melbourne. Things have objectively been getting much worse (e.g. ads inside and outside trains; and digitally-cycling ads are almost ubiquitous instead of rare, and animated ads are common rather than unknown), but I imagine there’s also a good chunk of me becoming more intolerant of these things due to no longer being acclimated to them. I don’t like being in Melbourne very much. Escaping ads and distractingly-dynamic or too-bright digital screens everywhere wasn’t (directly) one of the reasons I left, but it certainly is now.