I don’t know how to begin or restart again as it’s been several years since I’ve posted anything on my blog. In the last year, I’ve made some updates which is about it. Basically, I don’t contribute to my blog anymore. It’s just there floating in the web of internet space. I don’t want to get rid of it or contribute to it. I’m glad that people still find my blog and find some enjoyment in it. I recently vetted through a few comments and responded. Thank you for the positive feedback.

The reason I’ve decided to post a new article was because I’ve been doing some thinking and through the internet and reflecting on my life I’m coming to terms with how I should prioritize my life and how to be happier. That is the secret key, isn’t it? Happiness? In the United States, there’s the ideology of the ‘pursuit of happiness’ mentality. There’s the pursuit of success and eventually finding self-actualization as you climb the ladder, you will eventually be happy. The Google definition for self-actualization is, “the realization or fulfillment of one’s talents and potentialities, especially considered as a drive or need present in everyone.” The truth is according to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, with self-actualization being at the top of the pyramid, the majority of people in the world never reach that level in their lifetime. Why is that? Because the system for the majority is built and made to make us fail.

Let’s get to the reason for the title of this article. In the U.S., “We the People” refers to the Constitutional words are “the product” or otherwise the byproduct of corporations. I feel that the U.S. used to be a land of opportunities, a land of the free, and its democracy more aligned with that of the Roman Empire. However, with the advancements in technology and the explosiveness of the digital age, corporations have found ways to monetize us. We have become an oligarchy.

“In the U.S. ‘We the People’ refers to the Constitutional words are ‘the product’ or otherwise the byproduct of corporations.”

About a decade ago during the 2010s, I was in the pursuit of happiness. I had graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism and I had after a few years started to go to career and networking events in New York City. One of the biggest takeaways for me was what they would always tell us, “brand yourself”. Brand yourself? The idea is that you need to become a product to be attractive to the companies and corporations that are looking to hire you. It wasn’t about the excitement of being able to write stories and learn about the world and about others, no, it was how can you be an asset to the corporation. The mindset went from I have a dream to be a journalist to I have a dream to work for Time Magazine or Entertainment Weekly. This isn’t true, I’m just being hyperbolic. I had no idea what I wanted to do. I mean, does anyone figure out what they want to do for the rest of their life at eighteen years old? All I knew at the time was I enjoyed writing and was fairly good at it. I never put my writing down like a lot of other writers do. The stereotypical image of going through dozens and dozens of rolled-up papers was never my reality. I even took a lot of creative writing classes in college because that was what I was more interested in, but I was told by my Baby Boomer parents that there was no future in that and so I had to find something related to my interests that would get me a stable and sustainable career.

I was only in for a rude awakening. As no amount of effort, applying for x, y, and z companies in the field, or having and setting up some informational interviews would ever get me into a job. I managed after many tries to get an informational interview with Time which was super exciting at the time. I went to their office and met with a random person who wasn’t the same person at the networking event it seemed like a fair interview and I was able to show some of my work from my experience with TheCelebrityCafe, an online entertainment magazine where I wrote a lot of Conan recaps and one ABC Family reality TV show The Vineyard for one season where I was able to get an interview with the star of the show and create an article for it. Irregardless, that wasn’t enough for Time and I never heard from them again. They gave me no feedback, nothing. It felt like a waste of time and a slap in the face. Then about a year or two later, I managed to schedule another informational interview with someone at Reader’s Digest. I was once again super excited and had even taken off of work from my part-time dead-end job. I came to find that the day before I was about to meet with the person, they canceled the appointment last minute and never rescheduled. They didn’t give an answer and when I responded justifiably in a frustrating matter, the person was not apologetic and acted as if the company didn’t want that kind of attention. They were worried about their reputation. It was unprofessional and I was devastated. It wasn’t until I decided to quit my pursuit of journalism four years after I had graduated that I got a job and a career when I went back to school and got a Master’s in Social Work.

Another example of how corporations are afraid of their reputations being compromised was about 10 years ago with my two close friends. For the sake of keeping their identities private, I’ll call them M and H. M worked for a radio station and he was allowed to do an audio segment where he, H, and I blind taste-tested the french fries from McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, and Five Guys while giving our honest, but respectful constructive criticism on what we felt was the best. This was because Burger King had just updated their french fries on the menu. The recording was a lot of fun and I felt we gave some fair assessments of our opinions funnily. Unfortunately, the recording was never aired because the fast-food restaurants did not like the fact that we rated their french fries even though they asked us to do it in the first place and would’ve received free publicity. If you look at it like art criticism. The difference I notice between corporations and artists is that artists are willing to take constructive criticism for their work and are humble while corporations are so afraid that if you represent them in a bad light that it will ruin their reputation and thus lose money. It all comes to money. And if you’re wondering which french fries I thought were the best, I’m not going to reveal it… I’m kidding… it’s McDonald’s.

These were a few personal examples of how industries and businesses would only hire new employees if they labeled themselves as a product of the corporation, taking away any semblance of self-identity or autonomy. Another example I have noticed is the ever-growing advertisements on social media and streaming services. I’ve been around to see when YouTube was younger and when you never saw ads. Now for a 30-minute video, you’ll be attacked by 10 to 15 ad breaks with about three advertisements each with the skip button where you still have to wait a set amount of seconds and if you don’t click it right away, they will show the entire ad! Sometimes you get a screen that asks you to vote on which type of ads suit your interests or you can skip the survey. I always skip. If you want to get free ads on YouTube, you now need to purchase YouTube Premium for $13.99 a month, which is equivalent to $167.88 a year; that is absurd. And I hear that a lot of that high cost comes with many unnecessary features with YouTube Premium. You now see YouTubers making their own sponsorship commercials in the middle of their videos! You have Spotify Premium for $10.99 per month and now streaming services that never had ads which gave them their appeal, forcing you to pay more for stream services and bundles that are without ads, and the basic services for the stream that you once paid regularly without ads now have ads. It’s the same thing that happened with cable television. As I was watching YouTube on my TV, I noticed how angry I was getting and started to scream, “Stop selling me s**t! I’m not going to buy your stupid product!” I’ve also noticed that the audio for the ads on Spotify is significantly louder than the music that is played.

What’s up with all the medication commercials? You have pharmaceutical companies selling products without any medical knowledge telling me to take this medicine as it would reduce my cholesterol and then I could go from living in a colorless world (literally portrayed in the commercial) to living in a vibrant world where I start to garden and water plants, throw my dog a stick in a park, run a marathon or play horseshoe at a family reunion. Then the funniest part of these commercials are the quick narration for explaining all the dangerous side effects that can come with the medication. No, these medications should only be introduced and discussed on a personal level with your doctor.

Then if you look at TikTok, SnapChat, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. it’s true that in the background corporations are tracking the things that you search so that they can optimize their selling strategies so that eventually they get you to want something that you probably don’t need, but make you feel like you should need this product to make your life better when it’ll only do the opposite. There’s been multiple times where I would say something and an hour later I look at my phone and will get an ad for that very thing. I’ve also heard that companies are even trying to do the same with school children. The standardized tests take the information and optimize the student’s abilities to generate ads and commercials that would suit the student. On YouTube, as a YouTube video game streamer, I struggle immensely because the YouTube algorithm goes against what I enjoy doing and because my niche is in an overly saturated market. The YouTube algorithm is even something that tries to engineer a type of societal manipulation based on the constantly recommended videos you receive on your homepage. This can cause you to go down the YouTube rabbit hole and if you’re not careful enough, you’ve just spent most of your day and your time off watching pointless videos.

I’m going to slow down for a second and let you process my rant. It is true though and many of the other issues in the U.S. come with the unforgiving and punitive costs of healthcare, the unhealthy way that our food is processed and not protected, and how raising the cost of healthier foods deter and discourages people from having a better nutrition. Foods that are mass-produced with GMOs, pesticides, and steroids. All the healthy food places such Whole Foods for example, raise their prices. The fact that if you lose your job, usually due to unfair layoffs, you lose your health insurance. Why do our jobs determine our health? What does that say about our society? What are we teaching our people? If you want to leave a crummy job you dislike you also can’t because as soon as you leave and don’t have another job you lose your basic needs of health and/or sometimes get a better job with worse benefits. You have job salaries that haven’t adjusted to the inflation in decades (I heard that Social Work hasn’t adjusted to the inflation in 10 years) which causes people to either overwork or take on a second job. There’s either no or little paid vacation and there’s either little or no paid maternity leave, especially not for fathers. This is crazy because parents cannot spend enough time with their infant children. Babies need that nurturing time with their parents inorder to survive and be healthy adults when they grow up. Then the cost of childcare is through the roof and the cost of living continues to skyrocket without any explanation or effort to reduce it. Going back to social media, once those children grow up, you have young women who are turning themselves into sexual products by creating OnlyFans accounts because they can easily generate a lot of income. Even dating has become monetized through pay-to-play dating apps and the way that each person is viewed as a product to either be swiped right or left. When you want to move out of your parent’s house a new apartment complex looks enticing right? However, most of the time, with new housing developments, the cost of rent is so high that the average person cannot afford it. This is used as a way to target a specific elite group of people in a higher financial class.

Unfortunately, these issues rarely get addressed because politics has become a sport. Politics have become so polarized that voters will worship their political person. I’ve never worshipped and never will worship a politician and neither should you. Politics is meant to be a human services field to try and better the country. It’s supposed to bring people together, not tear them apart. And we are in the veil of a democracy, we are not an autocracy. We are called the “United” States of America, not the Divisive States of America. I think the core of what most Americans want is the same even from different sides of the aisle: to live peacefully, to live and be treated fairly, to respect one another, and to be held accountable if we are guilty of crimes.

The problem of this goes into how the news cycle has changed ever since I started studying journalism. The news cycle used to be more balanced with several different issues happening at once that would overtime be reported. Now, the news cycle becomes oversaturated with the same big story over and over again that goes on for a week until it completely gets cutoff and replaced by a new big story. All the news organizations are in competition with each other to see who gets the story first. Everything now is “breaking news” and everything is sensationalized to the point that if you turn on the TV to watch the news, it feels like the world is ending. The reason is that a few sets of corporations also own the news outlets. You have a select few corporations that own the majority of all major companies. I’m looking at you Disney and Amazon. As far as food goes, a list of companies that own everything are: Johnson & Johnson, Pepsico, Proctor & Gamble, Unilever, Mars, Coca-Cola, Mondelez International, KraftHeinz, General Mills, Kellogg’s, Comcast, Blackrock, Nestle, Danone, and Berkshire Hathaway. And you’ve had an increase in large companies merging which never has a positive outcome because it causes mass amounts of layoffs for workers with little or no severance. This increase in monopolization has become a huge problem for turning America into a corporate syndicate. There once was trust busting back in the days of President Theodore Roosevelt and even companies like Microsoft in the 1990s were reprimanded for trying to monopolize but now these corporations have too much power and influence in our government. Hence the lobbying that goes on. Corporations pay politicians tons of money for them to continue making laws that give corporations more freedom and more power than the human majority. This breeds corruption in our own government and so the people that are supposed to better us and protect us are not. When it comes to serious issues, the politicians rather look the other way because they sold themselves to the greed of an oligarchy. Greed is a major problem in the U.S.

One time back when I was in my undergraduate, I was on the phone with financial aid who explained the cost of what my tuition would be for the next semester. I noticed a trend that every semester the cost of tuition was going up. And so I asked a simple question in a respectful way to one of the workers in the office, “Why does it go up every semester?” I was immediately met with anger and abrasiveness. She said, “Because it goes up… that’s how it is…”. When I tried to ask a follow up question, she got even angrier. Then I was getting frustrated and said, “There should be no reason why my tuition increases”. It comes down to greed. Colleges even from the 1970s have had a 200-300% increase in the cost of tuition. Back when my parents were young, they could have gone to college and paid for their tuition while working a part-time job. Now, an eighteen-year-old child (we’re not actually adults until we’re 25 years old) is introduced to debt and confusing finances before they are even legally allowed to drink alcohol.

This article doesn’t serve much to provide a solution nor does it highlight the positives of living in the U.S., which there are, but shows negatives that seem to go unnoticed and ignored. It’s important to recognize the issues so that hopefully someday things can change for the better. Right now, the United States is going through a rough time. Just hearing about the perspectives of what others say about America versus their country puts a lot in perspective and is depressing. I think the problem is that we allowed capitalism to run rampant without putting into place any protections and/or laws. We’ve also allowed the internet to act as ‘the wild west’ without any protections. There are positives to capitalism such as the motivation to want to be greater, but I also believe that we need to adopt some socialism. Oh, I said the bad word. We have socialism in our country already. You see it with the police, firefighters, public libraries, public schools, road workers, etc. If you don’t have a backup system to assist people when things go wrong, you’re not going to have a sustainable society. Especially, when the focus is on the 1% or one-tenth of the 1% that controls everything while neglecting the majority of its people.

As I get older, I tend to believe in more of a foreign and European lifestyle. One that focuses the attention on a better-balanced life. One where work and success are not everything and is not how you are viewed or valued in society. In the U.S., the first time you meet someone, they usually ask you, “What do you do for a living?” I can probably ask you, to give me some great memories of workdays. And you probably would not be able to provide me much. However, if I asked you to give me some memories you’ve had growing up with your family and with close friends. You can probably give me specific details of a funny moment that had happened. We don’t tend to remember our pursuit of happiness, we remember the moments in time when we were happy. And I think that is the key. Foreign nations have been around longer than the U.S. so we should look to them because they’ve gone through a lot of their issues throughout history. They have evolved overtime to become more peaceful. Granted, there are a lot of issues still in foreign nations where some of them are faced with dictators. However, the biggest thing we can take away from Eastern cultures is the ideas of mindfulness and living more for the present than for the future. Spending more time with our loved ones than with the hours of overtime. I’ve heard from someone that they were working on call all day and weren’t even getting paid for it. That extra time could have been spent with people and traveling. I’ve always had the desire to travel, but always been discouraged and limited by the cost. I’m still contemplating how I can achieve this goal.

For now, since no protections are coming from the macro level and limited protections from the mezzo level, it is up to our individual selves to set those boundaries and make the effort to live the life we want. To not allow Corporate America to turn us into their products. We the people are humans to be appreciated and loved and to not become slaves of money. We the people will no longer brand ourselves for the benefits of an oligarchy. We the people, live in a democracy.