With the advent of social media, Nicholas J. Eastman writes, corporations are not only brand conscious, but conscious brands. Its marketing assumes the form of an intimate and absurd conversation about its, your, and society's misery. He contends that consumerism is the most potent driver of feeling, thinking, and doing, and for an increasing share of young people, this is a grave threat to their belief that life is worth living. The emergence of misery marketing signals the dominance of a therapeutic culture unable to break out of adolescent neuroses created and maintained by nihilistic consumerism and its colonization of the human psyche through new media forms. Advertising cannot be severed from its roots in psychology. Both are the systematic study of motives and manipulation. The credibility of both as a science is tied to their ability to understand human desire and manipulate it to yield predictable results.