It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.

Wallace’s line distills a core mechanism of modern advertising: it first manufactures or heightens a sense of lack—social, bodily, emotional, or status-based—then offers a commodity as the soothing remedy. The “anxiety” is not incidental but engineered, and the relief is framed as immediate and purchasable. In Wallace’s broader critique of consumer culture, this dynamic is ethically fraught because it converts ordinary human insecurities into market opportunities, training people to interpret discomfort as a problem solvable by consumption rather than reflection, community, or structural change. The sentence’s dry, almost clinical phrasing underscores how normalized this manipulation has become.