Where a society's imagination is kneecapped by unbridled advertisement economies, the resulting future is pushed towards more “pain” due to long-living companies being those that grow from the existence of such pains. Think TurboTax lobbying to keep tax laws difficult for the everyday American.

It begins with advertisers' selective pressure for the civilization's communication systems to maximize emotional bandwidth, to enable instruction and conversion. This in turn enables centralized businesses to scale with a focus on lowest common denominators among human behavior.

And what is something human behavior can agree upon? Most obvious is how we “evolved” to behave — fight or flight judgements followed by action to avoid fears, pains, and threats. There's the idea that humans are reliably driven into action (spend) only by fears:

It is much safer to be feared than loved because ...love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails…

Machiavelli

This can be applied to consumer behavior — fear triggers consumption more than love, and advertisements thrive on these insecurities. This growth over time was not necessarily agentic or conscious on the parts of the companies — it is just an ecosystem-level pattern, like natural selection, observable in retrospect. In hindsight, we can see that first advertisement-based connectivity has been maximized — television, social media “technologies”, entertainment — and now corporations have risen to “treat” associated resulting maladies.

*People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

Banksy*

If this continues, the future seems to drive human behavior away from its blossoming potential and towards a constrained perversion. We are being reduced to the lowest common denominators of pleasures and painkillers. What we notice is only the vague sense of "we are becoming less human" enveloping our thinking and complaints about society, and worse still we implicitly believe the common knowledge that it envelops those around us as well.

One way out of this web is higher-level psychological disconnection. If everyone is stimulated with relatable pains, disconnecting from receiving this stimulation seems a promising approach. "Digital detoxes" are halfway there — one indicator is that, to the growing "Internet native" culture, it is an unnatural state. It's a "different" behavior, a different psychological profile — similar solutions will have such a "sociopathic" quality in being something weird, unrelatable, or inefficient. But as they say: we're all insane — a certain type just happens to be more common.

Personal visions of the future are clearer to those disconnected from the sensory overload we experience. They have the ability to deny collective pressures with their minds, and their visions are naturally guarded by them expressing their unique potential and identity. One result is they are able to sustain greater “pain” because their processing of it is different. Marathon runners, underdogs, and rap music showcase this. Their pain is understood differently than how a beginner might understand it.

It's why we also admire the oddballs. When we're always told what we should be and how to do it, there's a boldness in "not really feeling that" and having your own kool aid. The possibility of detachment can only be explained by something greater out there, something by definition "other" and thus artistic, something human to the individual. Aren't we all seeking that?