8/19/26 - there will never be any new products ever again

I read some stuff recently about supply chain management, and it got me thinking: no one who's working in all the industries that have to do with products are going to have to truly be original, right? I mean, people in marketing, sales, advertising, and supply chain management - isn't it really just a recycling program of ideas at this point? Surely throughout all of history, we've uncovered all the potential human motivations. There must be maybe a hundred of them, max. Where else is there to go?

I remember feeling this when I worked in marketing for four years in my early twenties. It was then that I knew I craved novelty too much to be good at that job. In marketing, you're not reinventing the wheel. You're plugging customers into a pre-existing framework of who they are and what they want. And with AI these days, I'm sure that entire process has been put into hyperdrive. AI-driven marketing can see any customer desire coming from a mile away. It's the reason I'm cracking down on my own data privacy; I don't like feeling like every want I have is also known by someone else.

If we exist in a world of already-known products, what else is there to do? How long are we going to keep this game going? I feel like marketing has really just turned into high-tech spying on people. I'm pretty resentful about it. Though I guess it's a sign of something good that I don't often see advertisements for anything I might be interested in. I buy very little online; that probably contributes to it. There's not much customer information to track. Maybe that's the best form of protection. The other form is the ad blocker I have. 

Perhaps my own lack of online shopping was why I was never good at marketing: the baseline premise that people will be influenced by ads they see online didn't make any sense to me. Aren't ads a thing to be ignored? I will literally avert my eyes while ads play in front of me; I'm against them on a philosophical level.

So maybe what this boils down to is I just don't understand. I'm a "bad" consumer, so I can't read the tea leaves of consumption patterns.