Well, sloth is generally not a sin at all. Millions of people in offices only work three to four hours a day. The rest of the time they indulge in laziness, despondency, and all other sins.
Laziness and despondency cause a thirst for entertainment, and there is plenty of such goodness advertised in any big city. The competition is hellish, and marketers have to find space to deploy their campaigns. The only thing that is needed is to have a big enough budget.
The internet was created to entertain, engage, throw sales into the sales funnel, and then drown everyone who fells into laziness. Never before in the history of humankind has there been millions of invaders sitting right in your pocket in a magic box called a smartphone. You don't have to do anything. It's enough to simply lay back and swipe, swipe, swipe. Entertainment will come to you. You won't even notice that you have already bought a subscription to TV shows, an application to fight procrastination, ordered pizza that you can't handle, and paid some streamer that teaches English on the internet. All this was paid for with a credit card, and you can't explain to yourself why you need it.
Internet marketing is the dark art of capturing the attention of not only a bored user but also the user with big personal problems and taking advantage of the imperfection of the legislation.
Sceptic Reader vs. Author
'What do you propose, moralizing author?' an irritated reader might ask me. 'Business is business. Demand creates supply. People have weaknesses, and people are willing to spend money under their influence. Business is willing to pay for advertising. If we don't create this ad, so others will. So what are you doing here?'
Obviously, I am trying to invite entrepreneurs to use civilized, transparent, and effective methods of Internet promotion. As the striped Marty from Madagascar said, 'Give the taxi driver some tips. He should feed his family.'
After many years of struggle between my conscience and my hunger, I managed to get away from the direct advertising of products in an openly manipulative business. Nevertheless, I don't know what to do with the current state of affairs in our common economy of attention.
The answer is probably about a global change of the world's capitalist structure to some new form of a more fair and democratic distribution of material wealth. This new form will, perhaps, implement the concept of unconditional income, which will save the average person from semi-slave labor for peanuts, envy, and demonstrative consumption habits.
Humankind should reconsider its approach to ecology, as well as the ecology of its nutrition. Maybe anger management courses should be made compulsory in schools. It would also be great to introduce a psychology class in middle school, which will solve the problem of the spontaneous and uncontrolled development of sexuality in adolescents. Finally, universal deanonymization on the internet seems to be so close that it will allow for the blocking porn content for users under 18 with absolute efficiency.
Everything mentioned here is a global civilization problem. I would entrust their solutions to teams of scientists and research institutes but not politicians and transnational corporations. The marketers and people of related professions still have to make a personal moral choice every day: to work for a particular business or to say no to such 'happiness'.
It is clear that this choice can be so difficult that even the brain starts to explode. But, as a cultural figure once said,
'I'm not saying that we carry a load of shrines with us, but there were things we couldn't be careless about'.