Rediscovering the Human Spirit

I've lost a lot of my passion. It's something I've sort of known in my subconscious for a while now, but it took a mini-mid-life crisis to truly recognize that it wasn't just a temporary exhaustion and that my passion would be better in a few days/weeks/months.

Once you get past months and start saying, "years, yeah, when I pay this thing off, I'll take a pay cut to work on something I'm passionate about."

My drive to help other people has turned into complaining about the rich and criminals on Twitter.

My deep rooted hunger to create, whether writing or drawing or cooking or music has turned into a 10 minute a night routine to check a thing off my checklist.

My excitement at the thought of working for Marvel comics, or traveling with a band, or working at ILM, or for a non-profit has rotted to complacency. I punch my time card in and never punch it out.

I play video games as an escape. Modern games to have my little hero fantasy where only I can save the world. Older games to recapture my childhood where my passion raged dawn to dusk.

I buy junk to give little boosts of endorphins, convincing myself that this is good, this is right, this is the American way. The shackles of capitalism strapped debt to me in the womb and tossed me into the river, a constant fight to stay above water. The relief is the treadmill. Put a little on the credit card, it's fine, that's next months problem, you want that thing now.

I guess this is a long winded way of saying I want the time to just go and find myself.

I don't want to be attached to an inbox anymore or endless task lists. I'm tired of my brain feeling too drained to function. I'm tired of doing things on other people's schedules.

Is this the peak of human existence?

Us huddled around a screen in a 6 x 6 cubical,waiting for a notification to pop telling us we have another task to make our masters more wealthy. Sitting on the couch at night telling ourselves, one little check of my work email just so my morning is easier, not realizing we're further blurring the line between work and play. All too scared that these imaginary digital numbers held by a bank will someday run out.

A job used to be a means to do the things I like. I've not been taking care of myself and doing the things I like. I've been doing the things to get to the weekend and then lamenting the weekend is over.

I never did the backpacking across Europe, or three months off to travel America in a Toyota Camry, or teaching English in Korea like a lot of my friends did. I don't know if it would've put me in a different head space or Sal and I down a different path, but it would've been a hell of a journey, and sometimes that's worth it on it's own.

I just sort of want to disappear from responsibility for a week, without my phone, go see some national parks, and just be with my thoughts and some good music.

I want to get in a car and drive northwest and when I get tired of that, southeast. I want to meet strangers, hear their life stories.

I want to reconnect to myself and humanity.

Advertisements

It's a constant battle between the time humans have on this planet and the amount of money companies want to make. Advertisers are constantly finding ways to force us to watch their stuff. They get creative, we get more creative, they spend a lot of money on former creative types to come up with new creative ways, we figure out another way to get more creative. It's an arms race with no ending unless capitalism ceases to exist or we submit to our corporate overlords.

Drive highway 70 in Missouri, you'll see a billboard every 1/4 mile. (Missouri has the 5th most billboards in the country)

Got cable or Hulu/YouTube/Apple TV? You pay for that right? Yeah, well f*ck you, watch our ads too.

Going to our website? Oh what's this, you have an ad blocker on? Why you doing that? Is it because you got tired of a site taking 4 minutes to load only to blast you with auto-playing sound? Well too bad mother f-er, we noticed you have an ad blocker on, to read our content, you need to let us punch you right in your eyes and ears with all the POP UPS BLOP BLP BLP.

Google.com/search = St. Louis Blues Stub Hub. Top results: Ticketmaster (Promoted), Seat Geek (Promoted), Vivid Seats (Promoted), sixth result, Stub Hub/StLouisBlues.

Amazon.com/headphones, sort by highest review = 3.8 star promoted headphones, 4.1 star promoted headphones, 4.9 rated non-promoted headphones.

More often than not, promoted ads don't work on me. I blow past those promoted entries on Amazon or Google. Something about them I just don't trust. They're probably perfectly fine products, but if the company selling them needs to spend money on Amazon to move it to the top of the search results, I just don't want to give them the time of day.

Humans are constantly finding ways to not get advertised to... unless we want to be.

Hell, if you log onto Hulu right now, they have graciously compiled all of the Superbowl commercials into one package for your viewing pleasure.

Yes, I will pay this company $3 more a month to not see commercials. Ad block the internet. Fast forward my DVR through commercials. Just get up and do literally anything else during the commercial break.

This got me thinking about commercials in a way I never really had before. I used to ignore them, but that's not really true. They always lived somewhere deep in my brain because I can remember jingles to certain commercials. I can still recite the old Shane Company address, I can still sing the Charms Blow Pop song. Becky, the Queen of Carpet, more like the queen of my heart.

I didn't think much of this until I went to England and the commercials were completely different. They don't have pharmaceutical companies advertising drugs to you... because their medicine is socialized, and companies have to sell their drugs to the government, not to the people. (What they do have is insane amounts of gambling... ur... sorry... Bingo advertisements) It gave a completely different feel to the commercial break.

Social media is a new frontier of advertising. They collect data points based on what you like, what you search for, what your friends search for. Many companies go the old fashioned "promoted" advertisement route where those headphones you were looking at on Amazon earlier pop up in your feed as a slight nudge to remind you that you had them in your cart.

There are much more sinister, much more shady companies working to get you to buy their product. But just you buying their product isn't enough, they want you to buy product from someone who bought their product. And then get people under you to buy the product from you to sell the product.

I'm talking multi-level marketing companies. Somehow these thinly veiled pyramid schemes convince people to spend money for the privilege of selling their products on Facebook and Instagram. One of the newest ways to advertise if to your unsuspecting social media feeds.

You've probably seen posts from some of your friends trapped in these. "Hey be your own boss babe, :) I work 100% from home, and love it. You too can join my team, limited slots." Or maybe that person you knew from highschool that you haven't talk to in 30 years reaches out, asking if you would be interested in a great opportunity.

These posts annoy me, but somehow I can't look away. They all follow the same script, cutting and pasting their emoji filled paragraph. I've even caught people that were supposed to change their account to reply to their own post talking about how the product changes their lives.

Not all of these business have bad product, the real problem is, 99% of people don't make any money. They lose it. In fact, the FTC found less than 1% of people make money in MLMs. There's countless stories of divorces happening because someone drained a bank account. People going so far in debt they lose their house. There's even a Subreddit dedicated to antimlms.

• Young Living's founder performed surgery on people in the third world without a license and killed one of his children with essential oils. 
• Monet has been found to cause hair loss.  
• LuLaRoe is having quality issues at the same time they are losing "consultants" and can't pay suppliers. 
• Scentsy has a whole list of issues. 
• Tupperwear asking sellers to use their family's diseases to sell products. 
• DoTERRA misleads the potential income to an extreme level.

It makes me angry. These companies take advantage of lonely house wives, military spouses, people that have a dream of being their own boss and making a huge living, and what they do instead is drive friends away, cause financial strain, and equate to a lot of broken dreams.

You get it, basically these are all thinly veiled pyramid schemes that use loopholes to get around regulations. You wanna know if you've been buying from an MLM, here's a handy list. 

You can basically search any of those MLMs and find that there's issues with all of them.

So I guess what I'm saying is, if you have family or friends involved in selling the product, check on them. Maybe they are in one of the small group making money, but likely they aren't. Have a chat, make sure they understand the risk, and just check in on them.