Is this the first commercial you've seen where a company presents its product as something that will make your life better, or make you fit in, or make you more attractive to others?
You are clearly beyond the reach of reason, but maybe this explanation will be useful for people reading this thread.
The issue is that this ad vitiates therapy as such - if therapy is presented as a way to get dates with hot girls, it can't be a way to help you resolve serious problems. This isn't the case with, e.g., Axe body spray.
As an analogy: you would, I hope, be revolted by a funeral company that advertised their funerals as a place to meet girls at a time when they're emotionally vulnerable, and would not excuse it as presenting their product as "something that will make your life better, or make you fit in, or make you more attractive to others".
As the original article went into in detail:
> The above advertisement, which I think premiered in 2022, takes the medical tool of therapy and renders it a bit of dating-market gamesmanship, something bros just have to get on board with in order to hook up with high-value gals. I don’t expect a 30-second advertisement to reflect the reality that therapy is a frequently-adversarial process, that it’s at times uncomfortable by design, that it only works for certain kinds of problems, or that there are times when it can actually exacerbate them. ... What really gets to me is how a therapy company is going out of its way to make therapy appear so trivial, how the characters appear deliberately portrayed as unserious people and therapy so unapologetically represented as just a dating-market football. The commercial is somehow both grandiose about therapy’s purpose and dismissive about therapy’s actual use.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. Fortunately many of your other comments have been fine, so this should be easy to fix.
> you would, I hope, be revolted by a funeral company that advertised their funerals as a place to meet girls at a time when they're emotionally vulnerable
Of course it's stupid but I expect advertising to be stupid and I try not to pay attention to it. A company promoting therapy in a stupid way doesn't change how I think about therapy in general.
And if I see a dumb commercial about therapy I don't let it make me believe that "you hear 'everyone should be in therapy' from all corners".
We're supposed to be skeptical about advertising, not let it shape our view of the world.
The point is that they ran this ad in 2022 and it wasn't met with widespread ridicule or outrage (which happened with many, many other ads), which says a lot about the current culture.
> And if I see a dumb commercial about therapy I don't let it make me believe that "you hear 'everyone should be in therapy' from all corners".
Believe it or not, this commercial is not what made me believe that you hear that sentiment everywhere. What made me believe that was hearing it everywhere.
> There are armchair diagnoses of celebrities and other public figures happening in real time, alongside tweets admonishing people who display troubling behavior with the phrase “go to therapy!” There are detailed fantasies unfurled in long threads about what the world might look like if everyone (but especially cis hetero men) went to therapy and worked out their issues — all of the toxic masculinity poisoning the wells of communication and paths to healing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/11/opinion/therapy-america.h...
Is this the first commercial you've seen ever?