After writing that, I wondered about how we always portray "paradise" as a desert island, beach, tropical exotic location far from civilization and 'unspoilt', and portray a dystopia as a heavily urbanized and dirty city full of neon signs and billboards and industrial pollution.

Then the we talk reverses that, as if industrialization and capitalism as if bringing more products into our lives is making life better (read: closer to paradise), and so advertising and marketing are the heralds of all that's good about the future - if only you'd simply concede to stop whining and pay attention - it's for your own good after all.

I can't deny the short-lived excitement of novelty, but perhaps if we overall stopped making daily life so dystopian and unpleasant, we'd have fewer dreams of escaping it. What would a country look like if tens of millions of people didn't spend decades looking forward to retirement and gambling to get there quicker and dreaming of travel and products as temporary escapes from such unpleasant daily surroundings as need escaping from?