Several weeks ago, I wrote a rather gloomy essay about the feeling of being trapped in the contemporary marketing machine. After a recent conversation, however, I started to realized just how good I have it and just how practically possible it is to emancipate oneself from the tyranny of the attention economy.

In this recent conversation, both my wife and I realize how unusual it is that neither of us had watched a single advertisement for the upcoming election—not one. We’ve seen a few bumper stickers and yard signs while we are driving, of course, but we haven’t watched a single video or listened to a single audio clip.

This made us realize that it has been months, at least, since we have seen any kind of video commercial and several years since advertising jingles were regularly stuck in our heads. I have no idea what flavors of Doritos are current or what demonstrable improvements have been made by Tide over its competitors. I have not been able to eliminate the billboards from my eyesight as I drive down the highway—much to my resentment—but I admit that if this is the most annoying intrusion into the sanctuary of my daily aesthetic experience, I’m doing fairly well.

How do we manage this oasis in the midst of such vast tracts of vulgar product-hawking? Well, for starters, we never have owned a television or subscribed to cable. We have, at times subscribed to various streaming services, but we have done so less and less over the years and we never opt for the advertisement option. I would much rather simply unsubscribe than subject my time and taste to such grotesqueries. We don’t listen to the radio, and for music I have set up a home server onto which I have loaded my collection of jazz and classical CDs. I can still stream from anywhere on all my devices, but I own my own turf. For YouTube, we use the Brave browser which blocks the advertisements automatically, and it’s been many months since I’ve engaged with any other social media.

In our home, we have eliminated, as far as we can, the clashing colors of commercial packaging. We have many glass jars with neat labels into which we empty flour, pretzels, coffee beans, or detergent. Many consumables come in packaging with labels that are easy to remove and can easily be identified without them: peanut butter, Parmesan cheese, or shampoo, for instance. If there are necessary objects with branding that cannot be easily removed (or are generally made of ugly plastic), we do our best to hide them out of sight in closets or cabinets.

We refuse, especially, to make our bodies into billboards. We do not wear t-shirts with slogans, brand-names, lame jokes, wolves howling at the moon, band tours, or inspiring verbs. I avoid all clothing with a visible logo or writing of any kind, and my wife refuses to carry a handbag with a gaudy, fake-gold clasp in the shape of some brand logo that sells the illusion of status to lower-middle-class dupes.

We do not do all this on political or ethical grounds. (I’m rather in favor of a market economy.) Rather, we have eliminated all this from our lives purely out of annoyance at the imposition of ugliness into our daily experience.

The result is an aesthetic world composed on our terms. After all, as the owners of the house and the objects in it, why should we pay for the dubious privilege of bearing someone else’s branding? We try to make our home as harmonious and composed as possible, so that the vast majority of the time, what presents itself to our senses is a coherent array of colors, shapes, and symbols all bearing the impress of our family’s taste and personality.

Occasionally—very occasionally—the graphic designers for companies do produce aesthetically pleasing and tasteful branding, but even so, the branding for one company can hardly hope to harmonize with the branding of all the others. If you fill your life with branding and advertisement, the only possible result will be a cacophonous war of colors and messaging, each vying to elbow out its neighbors in the contest for your eyeballs.

What shocks me is how few of our friends have done likewise. I suspect they just don’t know how easy it is to live like this. After all, nine out of the ten things I mentioned above involve simply refraining from spending time and money on things most of us regret anyway. The only thing that involves a modicum of effort is the removal of labels when we bring items home from the grocery.

I also suspect that they are so acclimated to the culture of ugliness that they are not sufficiently annoyed to take even minimal action. For example, everyone hates YouTube ads, but I am surprised how few of my friends have taken the thirty seconds it requires to look up “How do I block YouTube ads?”

There’s much ink being spilled these days on the tyrannies of modern life, social media, or “late-stage capitalism,” but every time I read such complaints, I think about how strange these tyrannies are. In developed Western countries we are not being forced to do anything at gunpoint, and there are no secret police breaking down anyone’s door. Admittedly, there have been some shocking exceptions to that generalization, but their status as shocking exceptions proves my point. Although many modern ills are so embedded in our systems that opting out would involve pretty extreme measures—try getting on without email—many of the things that people complain of are things from which they could easily walk away with just a little reflection and will power. And how tyrannical can a tyranny be if you can just say, “No, thank you.”

The real tyranny, I suspect, is the one inside our own minds that keeps us from ever even thinking of opting out.