engineered anxiety

"all you have to do is create enough anxiety. then you have your market."_______heard this morning on bbc radio on the way to work.________on some level we all know that this is how advertising works ( although it isn't usually stated so blatantly...but the interviewee was talking about creating markets in the third world...and it is britain...old empires and imperial attitudes die hard )...we are all being manipulated...the consumerist utopia runs on engineered fears...status anxiety...fears of being left behind...of not having enough...primal ,evolutionary fears born out of an uncertain foraging past...if i don't get enough to eat i will die and my chances of finding enough are better with a group..more eyes...more ground covered..but if i'm not eating that status food ( nasturtium garnish for my salad? eating like inca royalty ) am i just surviving and not living? if i don't catch that raise or buy that bmw am i left behind...no longer of the group..a colorless existence...a greyscale of going through the motions of living? i would say not...my life looks like it's in color to me...so, knowing this, what kind of rational response can i frame? turning of the television for a start...this may be sacrilege to some...especially to advertisers and those who make a living from the medium...and on some levels it removes me form the group as i cannot follow the debates and discussions about what was "on" last night...but it does free me from the utopia's prime manipulating instrument ( television not manipulative? beyond the commercials just watch the "news" sometime..objective reporting, never very healthy, seems to be dead...we are being propagandized, not informed )..i need some basic understanding of events so by using a few newspapers ( i can ignore print ads [unless i am trying to gauge the ny times advertising revenue that day ] television commercials are imbeded in the information in a more unavoidable way ) and a selection of on line sites buttressed by information gleaned from books covering subjects with broader and deeper scope than any half hour of "news" could hope to approach i can ferret out something that resembles reality ( remembering that causality i so complex that no one has more than a general idea of what is actually going on...they may try to convince me they do but they cannot )...an imperfect approach..one that relies on some second-hand information and mu own limited cognitive abilities but relatively freer of the biases the consumerist utopia wants me to have..i have left television behind since the fire...john prine was correct.