The American Dream is Killing Us

Piggybacking off yesterday’s Daily Drabble, why do we allow others’ thoughts to affect us so much?

Why do we obsess over whether randoms online like or share our posts or what peeps irl think of us? It’s not like we’ll ever meet or see them again, so way so serious?

The answer, like most things in our modern hellscape ties into capitalism. Everyone is trying so hard to go viral in the hopes this might translate into dollars. 

Everywhere you look people are trying to sell us something(guilty as charged), because we’ve been conditioned to monetize everything we do.

So much so, people’s first instinct is to whip out their phones and start recording when an incident happens long before they consider helping out.

Why?

So they can become famous and live with some semblance of leisure outside their wage-slave jobs.

Repeatedly, we were told if you work hard and go to college you’ll get ahead. But the reality is most businesses couldn’t care less about their employees,and successful people are often products of dumb luck mixed with nepotism and sketchy ethics.

You can be the best in your field or craft and still fail commercially. And history has shown the opposite is true. Under capitalism everything is reduced to money and the more you have or something earns the more its perceived value.

This is no way to live. Yes, we all must pay the bills, but everything we do or are shouldn’t be monetized. We are not brands; we are people with hopes, loves, triumphs, and struggles.

What we are, what do shouldn’t be reduced to sound bites or tweets packaged for social media. My soul, my being isn’t for sale to the highest bidder. And neither should yours be.