I would contend that advertising, marketing, and consumerism are not noble causes for humanity, and engineers who devote their lifespan to enabling such things

I would contend that advertising, marketing, and consumerism are not noble causes for humanity, and engineers who devote their lifespan to enabling such things are wasting their precious allotment of time. Google's revenue driver is putting products in front of eyeballs. Imagine a world in which such a thing was not a market. Yes, you need awareness of products for people to buy said products. I get that. But no, you don't need to do data analysis on my browsing and search habits to come up with the most effective product to show me to increase the chances of me buying it. Spreading the word about a product is one thing. Treating the human being as a means to a sale, optimizing accordingly, and creating a market for "data" is another. That anybody on planet Earth would consider my shopping habits worthy of purchase just boggles me, and that I am not even consulted in most cases about analysis and sales of such data taking place is just the icing on the cake. It says something that I pay Comcast $100/month+ for entertainment and I am still shown advertisements for a third (or more) of every hour. I pay for the privilege of being shown new cars. Repeatedly. Black Friday comes to mind, too, as another example of the feedback loop losing control of itself. To be clear, things are not bad. Our consumer culture is a little bit out of hand, and I'd rather devote my remaining years to producing something of actual value instead of imaginary marketing value. To that end, that Google let me go was in fact a blessing in disguise, and I just hadn't realized it yet.