Guerilla Mindfulness: How I Use Ads As a Free Course in Happiness
Without buying the products
5 weeks ago, I installed a free ad blocker called ublockorigin on my work computer (it blocks Youtube ads, I highly recommend it). Since installation, it’s blocked more than 420,000 ads. Four hundred and twenty thousand. That’s an average of 12,000 ads a day, just on my work computer.
It’s easy to be mindful on a retreat, or in a temple, but as people who want to be mindful, we have to fight for mindfulness in our every day, capitalistic world. It’s much more challenging to maintain mindfulness when more than 10,000 ads a day are blitzed into our subconscious.
One month ago, while teaching a unit on advertising, I took my students through an analysis of the hilarious “Dior Sauvage” commercial featuring Johnny Depp. My students and I had a good laugh between the coyote on top of Johnny Depp’s car, and him burying his necklace in the desert (you may want to watch the ad for context).
As we were laughing at the pure silliness of it, a realization hit me like a ton of empty, terrible-smelling cologne bottles. They understand exactly what’s wrong with modern society! I realized. They’re just not helping.
In the digital age, advertising has traveled far beyond commercials on TV that allow us…
