Technology

A couple of ads isn't the end of the world for most people. Whilst I understand that they are undersirable, I also want the creators I enjoy to be able to get paid.

Some of the creators I enjoy are quite niche and they put their time, effort and money in to making the content. I don't think a couple of ads is too much to ask to help pay them back.

IPhone user?

This is a lesson I teach people at my job. It's called "people are people". The basic jist is that YOU this this way, and someone else, who isn't you, thinks this other way. The things you find important in life, may not be a priority for others.

Personally, I place a great importance in staying current with events about companies or politicians trying to take away freedoms, or invade their privacy for the sake of making a profit.

However, my sister is like "oh yeah! Let me just do this 23andme test!". When I explained what she had just done, she didn't care. When I explained to my mom that her putting my info into facebook invades my privacy against my consent, she didn't care. They both think I'm over reacting. They think it's some silly conspiracy theory that companies would use data of peoples personal info for profit.

They don't think like I do. Whatever your most basic common sense fundamental beliefs are, there are people, probably in your life, who don't give a shit about those things.

People are people.

There is no one definition of what a person is. There are currently something like 7-8 billion definitions of what a person is. And it's always changing. Some die off, others are born. Each individually self defined. And those definitions can change over time. My sister in her 20s was a party animal. Out till 3am. Every weekend. Not doing drugs, but certainly drinking.

Now she's in her 50s with a 13 year old daughter, and suddenly the world is full of scary people! She's in bed by 9pm, sometimes earlier. No partying. Maybe a midevening attendance of a play, with a glass of wine....but certainly not at a club partying till 3am! Her definition of who she is, and her self definition has changed since the 90s. That's what people do.

There will be people similar minded to you. There will be others who aren't. You can disagree with the similar minded people on certain topics, and find common ground on other topics with the people you thought you were nothing like.

People are people.

You seem nice

People on the opposite side of that tolerance spectrum look at us avid ad avoiders like we put in too much effort to do that, so I see it as two sides of the same coin. I started blocking/avoiding ads due to the nuisance, long before privacy and security became even more prevalent attack vectors through advertising. That was just a benefit to the time saved by blocking ads, but not it's a primary use case.

You could've been a bit more chill about it, if you gave him such a "withering look" that he lost interest in showing you something he was excited about and said never mind, then the issue here isn't that he didn't plug in his phone, it's that you were unnecessarily and unpleasantly anal about it and your friend just didn't want to deal with your fixation.