Wealth and the Ad-Man.

I have a problem with advertising. I hate it, and it's more ubiquitous and pernicious than it's ever been. It strikes me that there is something fatally flawed with the process we have increasingly fostered in developed cultures which might be described as ‘ad-mad.’

But advertising is only the vanguard of a system which so values the concept of wealth. So what is wealth?

It seems that over the past few thousand years, wealth has been defined in one of two ways: the value of possessions or the value of money. But here’s the rub:

Defining wealth by the value of possessions is only any use as long as people want what you’ve got. Defining it by the value of money only works as long as people have faith in a system based on something which doesn’t actually exist.

Doesn’t this lead to the inevitable conclusion that there is something fundamentally absurd and delusory about life in developed cultures?