What Marketing Can Never Fulfill: Desire, Vulnerability, and the End of Predictive Consumption

What Marketing Can Never Fulfill

The era of third-party cookies is coming to an end. Google has confirmed that by 2025, Chrome — which accounts for around 65% of the global browser market — will phase out third-party tracking entirely. For two decades, these invisible snippets of code allowed advertisers to follow users across the web, building predictive models of their habits and preferences. But with privacy regulations such as the GDPR in Europe and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and with 76% of consumers now saying they feel uncomfortable being tracked online (Pew Research, 2024), a chapter is closing.

What we are witnessing is not just a technical update — it is the end of an epistemology. Marketing once believed it could know everything about the other: anticipate, measure, and trigger desire. The digital age was built on a seductive illusion of control: collect enough data, and you could predict behavior; capture enough signals, and you could provoke conversion. The human being was reduced to a transparent consumer, and data became a one-way mirror.

Now that mirror is cracking. Algorithms can still tell us what people do, but not why they do it. They register clicks, but not the emptiness behind them. They measure engagement, but not loneliness; conversion, but not meaning. The metric cannot grasp the invisible dimension of desire — that deep human restlessness which no product or service can satisfy.

The death of the cookie era forces us to confront what we preferred to ignore: human desire is not a measurable flow; it is a metaphysical tension. Whether it takes the form of the desire for God, for love, for unity, or for recognition, it stems from the same root — a lack that no market transaction can fill. In trying to rationalize desire, marketing has sometimes emptied it of its soul. It has turned longing into a funnel, presence into segmentation, and listening into behavioral prediction.

And yet, this crisis carries a hidden grace. By losing the ability to track people as profiles, we regain the ability to meet them as persons. Marketing becomes less a science of prediction and more an art of discernment — of understanding real needs, listening to symbols, restoring relationship. What the cookies can no longer see, the human gaze can still perceive: the warmth in a voice, the silence that speaks, the fidelity that cannot be explained by a click-through rate.

Perhaps this is the true spiritual turning point of modern marketing: to move from predicting behavior to understanding desire. To accept that not everything can be fulfilled. And to realize that this irreducible mystery is not a weakness of the system, but its path to redemption. Because the day we stop trying to fulfill everything, we may finally begin to welcome, to listen — even in the act of selling.

From Maslow’s Pyramid to the Cartography of Desire

The Illusion of Measurable Motivation

For decades, marketing has relied on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as a universal key to human motivation. Developed in 1943, Maslow’s model organizes human needs into five levels: physiological, safety, belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. The logic is simple: once a lower need is satisfied, a higher one emerges. This framework became the foundation of consumer psychology — it seemed to offer marketers a scientific map of desire.

Indeed, a 2023 Deloitte study found that 82% of marketing leaders still use Maslow’s hierarchy, directly or indirectly, to design brand positioning and emotional messaging. Yet the model assumes a linear and predictable path toward satisfaction — as if human desire were a ladder we climb step by step. But experience (and psychoanalysis) tell us otherwise.

Freud: Desire as Energy, Not Lack

For Sigmund Freud, desire is not a lack to be filled but a pulsional force that moves, disguises itself, and returns in unexpected forms. It is not rational but dynamic — constantly circulating through dreams, art, sexuality, and language. A need can be satisfied (we eat, we sleep), but desire never ends. It migrates from one object to another, always searching for something beyond.

You can see this in today’s markets. After satisfying basic material needs, consumers pursue “meaningful consumption”: wellness, sustainability, authenticity. The global wellness industry, for example, reached $5.6 trillion in 2024 (Global Wellness Institute) — proof that the quest has shifted from having more to feeling more. Yet even there, satisfaction is temporary. As Freud would say, “the dream merely disguises the wish.”

Lacan: The Desire That Constitutes the Subject

With Jacques Lacan, the terrain of desire becomes more radical. He sees desire not as something we possess but as something that creates us. To exist as a subject is to be traversed by desire — to live within a structure of lack that can never be fully resolved. For Lacan, desire emerges in the space between need and demand, between biology and language, between what we ask for and what we truly long for.

In this gap, the human being discovers both its fragility and its freedom. Desire is born not from hunger, but from the impossibility of being entirely known or fulfilled. It is a wound that speaks — a restlessness that sustains identity. Marketing, however, has tried to domesticate this abyss. It has confused recognition with conversion, attempting to stabilize what must remain open. It has transformed the cry for meaning into a call-to-action, and the longing for encounter into behavioral data.

The result is measurable efficiency but existential emptiness. A 2024 McKinsey survey revealed that while 78% of consumers appreciate personalization, 61% feel emotionally empty after online purchases. The algorithm predicts actions but not motives; it records the gesture but not the heart.

The Crisis of Saturation

This is why we see a growing fatigue of meaning. Consumers are not exhausted by abundance but by redundancy — the repetition of the same promise of happiness attached to different products. Marketing keeps saying “you will feel whole,” while the human heart knows it will not. Each new launch, each new experience, offers a fleeting relief that soon collapses into another craving.

This loop of consumption is not driven by greed but by the hope that something might finally resonate. Freud would call it the return of the repressed; Lacan would call it the repetition of the signifier. In the marketplace, it appears as endless rebranding, the constant search for novelty to keep the system alive. Yet what we are really looking for is not the new, but the true.

Between the Pyramid and the Abyss

Here, psychoanalysis meets spirituality. Desire — whether directed toward God, love, or meaning — is not meant to be extinguished but transfigured. The human being does not suffer from having too many desires but from not knowing how to inhabit them. Marketing, obsessed with satisfaction, has often confused comfort with fulfillment. It has measured behavior but forgotten the vertigo of being.

Perhaps the future of marketing lies not in suppressing desire but in understanding it as a form of language — a sign that the human heart is still speaking, still searching. Between the pyramid and the abyss, between the measurable and the mysterious, there is a space where brands can stop trying to fill and start trying to listen.

Encounter in Heidegger, Lacan, and Edith Stein: The Self That Receives Itself from the Other

Beyond Prediction: The Mystery of Encounter

In a world where almost everything can be measured, encounter remains one of the few experiences that resists prediction. It arrives unplanned, unsettles our certainties, and displaces the ego. It is the moment when the subject ceases to be self-contained and discovers itself through the presence of another. Where marketing has sought to anticipate behavior, philosophy and mysticism remind us that the truth of desire is revealed only in encounter — that fragile instant where two freedoms recognize each other.

A recent MIT study (2024) on AI-driven personalization showed that while algorithmic systems can predict up to 92% of user behavior, they fail to capture the 8% of spontaneous interactions that define genuine human connection. It is precisely within this unquantifiable remainder that the mystery of encounter lives.

Heidegger: The Openness of Being

For Martin Heidegger, the human being is not defined by what it produces but by the way it dwells in the world — its Dasein, its being-there. Existence is not a possession but an openness, a being-exposed to time, finitude, and the silent call of Being itself. In Being and Time, Heidegger insists that truth cannot be seized; it can only be unveiled through listening.

Encounter, therefore, is not a functional interaction but an event of being — a revelation that pulls us out of calculation. In today’s business world, where over 80% of corporate interactions are now mediated by digital tools (McKinsey, 2024), this Heideggerian reminder feels prophetic: to exist is to listen, not to process.

Lacan: Desire and the Gaze of the Other

In Jacques Lacan’s thought, the human subject is born through the gaze of the Other. The Other, with a capital “O,” is not a specific person but the symbolic order itself — the realm of language, desire, and recognition. The ego is never autonomous; it comes into being through the acknowledgment of that Other.

Lacan’s famous assertion — “the desire of man is the desire of the Other” — means that we do not simply want something, we want to be wanted. Desire seeks recognition more than satisfaction. In this sense, the subject is not self-created but received — drawn forth by the look, the word, or the love of another.

Modern marketing, however, has replaced this gaze with surveillance. It recognizes patterns, not persons. The algorithms that now power global advertising platforms process hundreds of billions of data points per day, yet what they see are profiles, not presences. The human face disappears behind the metrics. What once was dialogue has become prediction.

Edith Stein: The Soul That Receives Itself from the Absolute

Edith Stein, a philosopher formed in the phenomenological school of Husserl and Heidegger, takes this logic further into the spiritual realm. For Stein, encounter is not merely a phenomenon of consciousness but a communion of beings. The soul is not an isolated entity but a vessel of participation — structured to receive itself from an Other, ultimately from God.

Where Heidegger speaks of disclosure, Stein speaks of donation. The human person becomes herself not by self-assertion but by receptivity, by allowing the presence of another to dwell within her without possession. True relation, for Stein, is not capture but hospitality.

This overturns the logic of the marketplace. Marketing seeks to capture, to retain, to convert; Stein’s anthropology suggests that to encounter another is to let them be. The customer, in this symbolic reading, is not a target but a mystery. Not a segment to analyze, but a face to receive.

The Vanishing Face in the Digital Age

In 2025, global users spend on average 6 hours and 37 minutes per day on digital devices (DataReportal). Yet this hyperconnectivity conceals a paradox: while we are more connected than ever, 46% of people report feeling lonelier than before (Ipsos, 2024). Heidegger’s listening to Being, Lacan’s desire of the Other, and Stein’s communion of souls all converge here — reminding us that connection is not contact, and presence is not visibility.

Marketing predicts, calculates, and segments, but it rarely encounters. It detects signals, not faces. And yet, as Stein reminds us, the truth of the self is revealed only through the gaze of the other. The human face remains the last frontier of mystery — the one thing that cannot be digitized without being diminished.

Perhaps this is the essential question for the twenty-first century: do we still know how to meet? In the noise of algorithms and the transparency of data, we must rediscover the silence of presence. Heidegger teaches us to listen to Being; Lacan, to accept the lack that constitutes us; Stein, to receive love as the origin of the self. Three languages, one truth: the subject is never the source of itself, but the fruit of encounter.

The Mystical Experience: The Wound of Desire and Vulnerability as Sacred Ground

The Body as Prayer

There are nights when the entire body becomes prayer — not through words, but through a total tension toward God. Every fiber of being stretches toward the invisible. In such moments, desire is no longer an idea or emotion: it becomes living matter, a burning presence coursing through the flesh. The soul no longer seeks to understand or to satisfy itself; it allows itself to be seized. It turns wholly toward the One — unable and unwilling to fulfill itself.

Mystics have often called this state a wound of love. St. John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila, and Thérèse of Lisieux all speak of these transports where God seems both near and infinitely distant, leaving the soul consumed by longing. It is a paradoxical pain: the closer the love, the greater the ache of separation. This divine fire does not destroy — it purifies. It strips away every illusion, exposing the self in its most vulnerable truth, where no defense, mask, or certainty remains.

Desire as the Name of Vulnerability

In that nakedness, something essential is revealed: desire is the spiritual name of vulnerability. It is not weakness but openness. To be vulnerable is to be capable of being touched, moved, even wounded by love. Where modern culture seeks protection, control, and performance, the mystic consents to being undone. She does not attempt to heal the wound; she lets it become a place of encounter.

Philosopher Edith Stein, in The Science of the Cross (1939), describes this experience as a pedagogy of transformation: the soul possesses itself only by surrendering itself. This surrender is not defeat but ontological reconfiguration. Desire is not satisfied but transfigured — it becomes receptivity, a dwelling place for divine presence. What the world calls lack, the mystic recognizes as passage.

The Diptych of Desire: The Sacred Ache vs. the Modern Void

Here lies the great paradox of our time. The same human longing that once drew the mystic toward God now drives billions toward digital distraction. According to the Global Web Index (2025), the average person spends 6 hours and 37 minutes per day online, much of it scrolling through curated illusions of connection. And yet, 46% of people report feeling lonelier than ever (Ipsos, 2024). The body that once trembled in prayer now trembles from overexposure. The fire that once burned for transcendence now flickers in dopamine cycles and notifications.

Both movements come from the same human structure of desire. But one opens to infinity; the other closes in on itself. The mystic’s night is an exposure to excess meaning, while the digital night is a defense against emptiness. In one, the body suffers because it is overflowing with Presence; in the other, it numbs itself because Presence seems absent. The tension is the same — the direction differs.

A 2023 Harvard study on spirituality and mental health found that individuals who describe having “transcendent moments of longing” show 35% lower rates of anxiety and depression than those who do not. The pain of divine desire, though real, transforms. The pain of self-centered desire, though quieter, corrodes.

Vulnerability as the Ground of Encounter

To live this tension consciously is to rediscover vulnerability not as a flaw but as the ground of encounter. The wound of love becomes the threshold where the human and the divine meet. Freud saw desire as an unending repetition, condemned to dissatisfaction. Stein sees it as a paschal journey — a movement through lack toward donation.

In this perspective, the body is not merely a site of consumption or performance, but a temple of passage — the place where the invisible takes form. When the whole body stretches toward God, it does not seek to escape itself but to become transparent to what it hosts. The trembling, the burning, the sleepless nights are not dysfunctions but revelations: signs that life is being touched by something greater than life.

The Hidden Economy of the Heart

In the end, desire is not meant to be soothed but inhabited. It is not a problem to be solved but a space through which God — or the Other — speaks. What looks like fragility is in fact hospitality; what feels like pain is the threshold of grace.

The mystic and the modern consumer share the same structure of longing, but they live its direction differently. One suffers toward fullness; the other consumes toward emptiness. And perhaps the role of our age — in theology, in marketing, in human life — is to learn again how to suffer toward the real, how to let the wound speak instead of silencing it with noise.

Because in the end, it is precisely there — in the wound, in the trembling, in the sleepless vulnerability — that the encounter still happens.

Why Spiritual Editorial Content Is a Strategic SEO Asset — Not a Liability

In an ecosystem increasingly saturated with AI-generated content and keyword-stuffed pages, Google’s algorithm has quietly shifted its focus from textual optimization to human signals. What search engines can no longer trust is volume. What they increasingly reward is authentic engagement.

Long-form editorial content grounded in philosophical, spiritual, or symbolic reflection generates precisely the signals Google seeks to measure — even if it cannot interpret their meaning directly. These texts consistently produce longer session durations, deeper scroll depth, and lower bounce rates, all of which are key indicators used by Google to assess whether a page is experienced as “helpful” by real users.

According to multiple SEO studies conducted after the 2023–2024 core updates, pages that hold readers for more than 4 minutes on average and demonstrate sustained interaction are significantly more resilient to ranking volatility than pages optimized solely around keywords. In contrast, sites relying heavily on automated content or semantic repetition have experienced visibility losses ranging from 30% to 50% following recent updates.

Spiritual and symbolic editorial articles cannot be duplicated by artificial intelligence because they are not built on data recombination, but on human interiority, experience, and language that carries existential weight. This non-replicability is not a weakness in SEO terms — it is a signal of authenticity. For Google, such content helps distinguish a living site from a “ghost site”: a domain filled with technically optimized pages that generate little real engagement.

When strategically linked to pillar pages — whether CSR commitments, brand philosophy, services, or products — these articles act as semantic anchors. They deepen the site’s narrative coherence, reinforce topical authority, and create a meaningful internal linking structure that supports both indexing and long-term visibility.

From an SEO perspective, this kind of editorial content does not compete with commercial pages. It humanizes them. It allows Google’s algorithm to detect that the site is not merely a transactional interface, but a space of thought, reflection, and genuine human presence.

In an age where automation produces infinite text but little meaning, spiritual editorial content becomes a rare differentiator — not by opposing SEO logic, but by fulfilling its most recent evolution: rewarding sites that are read, inhabited, and remembered.

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Conclusion – Toward a Listening Economy

In the end, the story of marketing and the story of the soul share the same illusion: the belief that desire can be satisfied. For decades, algorithms have tried to predict what people will do next, while mystics have tried to listen to what the soul already knows. One built an empire of data; the other entered the silence of the night. And both, in their own way, discovered the same truth — that desire is never conquered, only encountered.

What is ending today with the disappearance of third-party cookies is not merely a technological tool, but an era of control. It is the twilight of a model that treated human beings as predictable systems rather than living mysteries. The more we tried to measure behavior, the more we lost contact with meaning. Now, in the age of AI and predictive analytics, the challenge is no longer to know more, but to listen deeper.

The mystics remind us that the human being is not defined by what it consumes but by what it welcomes. Edith Stein would say that the soul becomes itself only by receiving itself from the Other. Heidegger would call this openness to Being. Lacan would name it the gap where the subject is born. In every case, the same invitation echoes: to replace mastery with attention, conversion with communion, persuasion with presence.

If marketing wishes to survive its own exhaustion, it must rediscover this contemplative dimension. Not by moralizing or spiritualizing commerce, but by remembering that every act of communication is a moment of vulnerability — a reaching out from one being to another. The brands that will matter in the next decade will not be those that shout the loudest, but those that listen the most truthfully.

The market, like the soul, is a field of longing. It is not meant to be controlled but cultivated — tended like a vineyard, with patience and reverence. Between the measurable and the immeasurable, between the algorithm and the silence, lies a space that no data can fill: the space where meaning breathes.

And perhaps that is what marketing, after all its noise and numbers, was always seeking — not the power to satisfy desire, but the grace to accompany it.