The nagging and attention-stealing is everywhere. Every time I buy something online that's not Amazon or Apple, I get signed up for an email newsletter. I get spam in the mail, often from, say, furniture companies because they have some kind of sneaky thing that gets leads from pages I visit. I've never bought anything from Flos, Design Within Reach or Bonobos, but in my mailbox the crap goes.
These things add up. It's just a never-ending deluge of materialistic effluent.