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I recently made the acquaintance of a young man from Brazil.

In the course of our conversation, he talked about how oppressive he finds modern technology. If you send a text and the person doesn’t answer right away, you start to wonder: “Did I say something wrong? What did I write to him last time?”

Sometimes the stream of news over Facebook makes it seem as if everyone’s being productive and having a great time except yourself. Some of my friends, he told me, become depressed after checking their Facebook news feed half a dozen times a day. He was thinking of killing his Facebook page altogether.

I agreed that this can be the case, and told him I don’t own a smartphone, I’ve never sent or received a text, and my wife and I got rid of our car 12 years ago. These are all expenses that suck up resources -- both time and money -- that I would rather devote to other things (or not have to generate the income to pay for in the first place).

But it’s not simply technology’s fault. This phenomenon is mainly just an expansion of an effect that capitalist/consumer culture, especially its marketing wing, has always had -- indeed, actively seeks to impose on us.

Movies and television shows (and increasingly, newscasts), have one only purpose: to keep you watching. In order to do that, they throw the most startling, violent, thrilling, expensive spectacles and events at you. That’s how they keep the numbers of their audience high, and thereby secure funding from sponsors.

Meanwhile, the sponsors add their own content to the mix. Advertising is designed to make you feel less pretty, less strong, less certain, less fit, and less intelligent than you are … or at least less than you think you ought to be (and everyone else supposedly is). The aim is to keep you weak and uncertain so that you’ll buy their service, their product, their weekend getaway -- which of course will make it all better.

The ideal consumer is someone who is prey to steady, ongoing dissatisfaction and insecurity that never fully goes away. And marketing and entertainment will do its damnedest to mold you into that state. Because a happy person may not feel a need to buy anything. Corporations want to make us all into little Tantaluses.

I realized back in college that many people define success in terms of becoming an ever more powerful and efficient eat-and-shit machine. That’s to say, they hope to be able to consume and possess ever greater amounts of goods and services over time, which inevitably creates more waste and excrement.

When you agree to this devil’s bargain, however unthinkingly, that heightens the odds that you will become enslaved to your job and the access to a salary that pays for all those goodies. It becomes a vicious circle: you have to work ever harder, hustling for the next promotion, to be able to afford the toys and weekend/vacation escapes that compensate you psychologically for the burden of working the rest of the week.

This is how the terms “humpday” and “TGIF” came into common parlance: one’s entire workweek is characterized by the struggle to survive to the weekend so you can recharge for the next round of labor … to pay for the goodies that compensate you for the wear and tear of that workweek. When people refer to humpday and TGIF, they’re tacitly admitting that they are probably not doing what they would prefer, and are probably, to some extent, enslaved to the eat-and-shit cycle.

If you were doing what you loved, you probably wouldn’t find it a struggle to get through the week, to “survive” to the weekend; and you might not feel such a craving for escapes, toys, panaceas, and lots of other things you don’t need … including the latest news on your mobile about what your friends are eating or doing, or what silly thing happened elsewhere in the country or the globe that really doesn’t have anything to do with you, except to take your mind off your present situation for a second or two.

“When I was in Brazil, all I wanted was to come to America, and to be an American,” my new acquaintance said. “Now, all I want to do is go back to Brazil.”