I keep returning to Cricket Guest’s superb Diet Coke Essay lately. It’s a great piece detailing the constant bombardment of marketing forces shaping our desires and stretching the definition of what counts as “choice.” In picking Diet Coke over Coke Zero (or vice versa) in the U.S., we affirm micro-identities assembled from nothing but remembered phantasmagoria, shreds of previous advertisements and suggestions long drilled into our brains by far-flung marketing departments.

It’s a whole ass culture of incessant suggestion, implication, identity-signaling, and branding-as-moral-compass. Even the absence of a label is a label (but there’s never an absence of label); the shade of a can is an argument and act of self-definition. That we so seldom think about it is proof perfect of advertising’s efficacy.

Reading it here in Vietnam (where the only diet Coke you can reliably find is Coke Zero) is utterly surreal. The stark contrast makes the bizarre parading corporate carnival of the U.S. exquisitely transparent.

In the States, we think we’re choosing, but we’re more often unwittingly herded through a noisy labyrinth world constructed by soul-dead corporate minotaurs armed to the teeth with color palettes, TV slots, fonts, ad-buys, and granular data that could probably predict your miserable morning mood two Thursdays from now.

Here, none of this monstrosity exists. A soda is just a soda. A coffee is just a coffee, preferably a furiously stout cà phê sữa (akin to a latte in the West) that will get your neurons firing at a machine-gun pace, so overstimulated you can taste the number purple.

Products don’t constantly wrench your identity, status, inner self, your future self, your aspirational self, or whatever tickles your fantastical fancy. No one thinks about whether a can is silver or black. There’s just…a bubbly ass drink—an object in the world; a thing you choose because you want it, something you enjoy unthinkingly without implicitly making a statement.

Theres unspeakable freedom in this: freedom from being endlessly nudged, pushed, coaxed, seduced, guilted, inspired, and pseudo-empowered by what is essentially the world’s most elaborately-funded peer-pressure machine, endlessly firing roller-coasters of human emotion for profit.

I can’t help but wonder how many of our preferences are genuinely ours? How many are implanted fictions? More importantly, how do we go back? Is there no uninstall button to any of this cultural software?

The essay is worth a spin if you haven’t already.