The Evolution of Economical Obsession - How Greed Consumes Our Culture

In an age where our ego is our life, it's unsurprising that the main drive throughout society is money. Money is what fuels our ego, what allows us to but our extravagant cars and fashionable clothing that, apparently, define our personality. Money is what gives us permission to show the rest of the world that we are 'superior' to our fellow man; or so we've been told, that is. But how did we get to this? How have we 'progressed' from the olden day family orientated attitudes and beliefs of togetherness and preservation to the self-centered, money infatuated values that we hold in modern society?

Let's start from the beginning shall we? From the moment we reach the pre-operational stages of childhood, we are undergoing the 'crucial' training that will allow us to sustain a job and earn the income that will support us for the remainder of our lives. We are dumped in preschools and day-cares from as early as 2 years old to allow us to adjust to the interaction of our fellow toddlers and gradually adapt to the early stages of the education system. From then, we go onto elementary school, where we are learning the skills necessary to survive secondary school, which in turn prepares us for university or further education. The survivors are then handed a degree or certificate and forced to seek employment, but at the end of the day, we are all abruptly thrust out into the workplace to earn what little currency is left untouched by 'the big dogs' of the industrial world. In short, our interest in money sparks at a young age and as we grow, manifests into an overwhelming obsession.

It's not just our innocent, childhood curiosity that is to blame for our infatuation. We all want to feel superior to the everyday man. We buy new clothes and furnish our houses with money we don't have so people can look at us at think, 'Wow, they really know what they're doing with their life, don't they'. Every time someone other than ourself is complimented on materialistic possessions, our ego comes into play. We always want to be better than everyone else. We are not satisfied with being second best. The fact of the matter is, that few seconds of euphoria achieved by trying on your new Ralph Lauren jacket for the first time is infinitely more satisfying than, say, sampling the greatest Italian cuisine or sniffing the best rose. We crave capitalism because it's the only means of escape from the Great Depression that is our lives. We live content in a society ruled by money as opposed to the people because it allows us to feel at ease within ourself... we have become numb to the negligence of nobleness. 

We are never truly happy; our obsession with money is evident of this. We suffer delusions of self-satisfaction because it's the only thing that separates us from insanity. By creating the illusion of happiness, we fill the emptiness inside accumulated by years of neglect and subliminal self-loathing. This is why we shop, drink and gamble.

See Also: Why we use drugs.

See Also: Why we lie.

Perhaps our economical obsession is just a brief phase in the course of humanities' evolution. After all, we are the only species that exhibits traits of greed and self-centered behavior. Sure, some animals consume more food than they may need and others may attract more sexual partners than necessary, but these traits would be acknowledged as gluttony at most! Furthermore, these attitudes towards wealth were far less prominent a few hundreds years ago. In Elizabethan times, it was a simple matter of the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor. Society was divided into the working class and the aristocrats. I could divulge an entire blog post dedicated to the 'classless society' we live in (in fact, I already have), but we'd be digressing from the main point if I were to do so in this article. 

No matter how far our fetish for fortune evolves, we will never be satisfied. The simple fact alone that we are no happier than we were during the mid-20th century, despite the huge increase in personal wealth. It seems people have been trying to buy their own happiness and they are finding out the hard way that this act is impossible. Finally, let me end on a quote by the political theorist, Clive Hamilton, from his economical eudaimonistic, the Growth Fetish: 'People buy things they don't need, with money they don't have, to impress people they don't like'... There; I think that quite adequately sums up the article, don't you?


As always, keep your mind open and your legs closed.
xoxo
Gossip Brad

Common Sense: How Logical Thinking is Vanishing From Society

"There is nothing more uncommon than common sense."

Common sense has the power to dictate our every thought. It has the ability to overthrow all desire and abandon all outside reason; it is what keeps us from making an absolute fool of ourself. At the end of the day, common sense is what tells us that walking across the highway will result in you being splattered across grandma's window screen and that shoving your head in a fire will cause a similar effect to that of the end scene in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark.

How I Feel When Reading Certain Facebook Statuses

But people, particularly in more recent times, have abused this power. Obviously, to said people, one persons completely irrational opinion is more reasonable than logic. There are so many ways I can approach this post, but in the interest of not caring about what you guys think, I'll keep it simple.

First let's start with chain mails; the only form of fictional documentation where you can receive riches or suffer a punishment simply by not sending it on to others. Contrary to belief, chain mails actually existed long before the internet, but you know what, you can look that up yourself if you're interested, I'm not your friggen history teacher. Anyway, most people that recieve an email explaining that if they don't forward it to all their contacts that they'll be destined to a life of misery can happily laugh it off and send it to their recycling bin... however there are others out there who are not in the same mindset. Now, don't get me wrong, I used to send chain emails too... you know, when I was 11. What drives someone to send one of these? How is it possible to come to the conclusion that if you don't forward a story about how little Suzie fell down a well and now attempts to redeem herself and get a college diploma (or something like that) then you'll be condemning her failure? Why are these people just abandoning all common sense?! I can sit and discuss how ridiculous chain mails are all day, but I don't wish to give them the satisfaction of dedicating an entire blog post to them, so I'll forward on (see what I did there... mmm, screw you all.)

Being an avid Facebook user (Facebooker? Facebookist? Facebookman? I don't know), I see viral trends and memes come and ago faster than Kim Kardashian's marriage and one of the more popular 

ideologies is how liking a photo will somehow cure cancer or save a starving child in Africa. The 'like if you remember these' photos are bad enough, but the 'like in three seconds if you're against child abuse'. I wonder what possesses someone to think to themselves, 'Let's like this photo to show people I'm against abuse!' That's just common sense, isn't it?! You're not supposed to like child abuse in the first place, there's not reason to announce it to the whole goddamn internet! I've even seen an incline in 'For every like, Facebook will donate $1 to this dying girl'. ARE YOU SERIOUS?! WHY WOULD YOU THINK THAT LIKING A FACEBOOK PHOTO WILL SOMEHOW BENEFIT I DYING CHILD?! This is how I imagine the way those peoples minds function, as told through a narrative.

A doctor walks in the room, explaining to a girls crying mother that her daughter will not survive the night. The mother begins to sob even harder. 'Isn't there any thing you can do?!' She cries. 

'Well', the doctor leans towards the mother and whispers, 'I do like Facebook pictures... so I'll make you a deal. If you can get 1000 likes on a picture of your daughter... I'll see if I can make some... arrangements.' 

4 hours later, the doctor confronts the mother and asks how many likes the photo has recieved.

'Only 197..' the mum whimpers.

'NOT GOOD ENOUGH!' the doctor yells.

'YOU ANIMAL!' the mother sobs

'1000 LIKES IN THE NEXT 5 HOURS OR THE GIRL GETS IT!'

What I'm trying to say is liking a photo does nothing. Get that through your head. It doesn't matter if 10 people like it or 10 million people like it, it's not going to make a scrap of difference.

The main point of this post is to emphasize the rapid decline of common sense in recent times and I think I have discovered the cause... the internet. I use the internet everyday and nonetheless I find it one of the most brilliant and useful form of technology, I just believe that it's power is being abused and mankind is suffering the consequences. I don't necessarily feel it's making humanity in general any stupider but there's no doubt that it's having a detrimental effect on he perception of logic. Before Google, before Facebook, before the internet, mankind had to depend on itself. Viral memes was word of mouth; logical information was found in written print, not on Wikipedia. There was more control of what was being imprinted into the minds of the public and those lower on the social hierarchy (where, in modern times, false information is abundant) had little to no control of spreading information whatsoever. To put it shortly, the spread of information was limited and even when something did slip through the cracks, word of mouth only allowed it to be extended onto a few people at a time. Nowadays, the internet allows anything to escalate. With blogging sites such as these, everyones opinions can be accessed by the entire modern world within seconds and whilst that is usually quite harmless, the power of the written word can be very dangerous.

There's so much I want to talk about regarding common sense. I haven't even began to elaborate the my thoughts on superstitions and how inconceivable that the relative position of the planets and stars could have a special deep significance that exclusively applies to people who believe in 'horoscopes', but what are you going to do I guess.

Keep your mind open and your legs closed,

xoxo Gossip Brad.

Modern Day Utopia - The 'Classless Culture' for the Everyday Dictators of Society

I used to want to make an impact. Before I learnt the true nature of the world, I wanted to make a lasting impression on mankind; I wanted to help the people. But society has made me cynical.

A few years ago, I went through the usual prepubescent stages of self discovery, which in my case focused on determining what I wanted to do with my life. Throughout my childhood, society had told me that the world was my oyster; that if I wanted something badly enough, all I had to do was reach out and seize it. However, over the years I’ve learnt that society will do anything it takes to prevent you from achieving your desires. They'll pull the rug from under your feat and leave you stranded on your own merit as soon as the 'shit hits the fan', so to speak. It's not just that society that is causing corruption; people in general are more than willing to scorn their best friend and abandon their beliefs in attempt to rise up the social hierarchy. I'm all for trying to improve ones quality of life, but at what cost does that become 'immoral'. In times of such extortion, loyalty is one of the most valuable yet scarce commodities and it is only until mankind as a whole can collectively acknowledge this that it can have any chance of redemption. On top of this, although humanity is consistently 'looking out' for the next wave of young adults and 'trying to create a better tomorrow for our youth of today', we are subconsciously making it progressively more difficult with every passing generation.

Adolescence is difficult. In fact, it's often refereed to as some of the most difficult years of your life. Not only do you get to experience they 'joys' of social awkwardness, endure the constant fluctuation of self-confidence and sustain often intolerable facial acne, but you're also bestowed with the enormous pressure of sorting out your own life, something that can be quite challenging for a young teenager. In this day and age of premature self-dependance, it's no wonder why nearly 300,000 teenagers every year attempt suicide. Now, before you get on my case stating that children have to been forced to mature and begin an early employment for many years prior to the present, I would like to point out that a lot of those children were not forced by society but by their families or guardians, most commonly due to financial concerns. Modern civilization, however, does not suffer the same financial hardships that our forefathers suffered and although we are only just emerging from the current recession, we have not been subjected to the level of poverty that existed, say, 80 years ago and it is therefore impossible to compare them so. Excuse me, I'm getting off topic. Anyway, with all this pressure that's being burdened upon todays youth, it should not be unexpected when these adolescents turn to vandalism, crime or substance abuse. We are applying Darwin Theory of Natural Selection to not only 'weed out the weaker ones', but also to create the criminals that we as a society attempt to isolate and outcast. I'm not making excuses for mass murders and rapists, blaming the government for conforming these 'monsters' and demanding that they be immediately rehabilitated into the community, but the higher forces of the so called 'justice' system should at least take some responsibility as opposed to ignoring the issue completely and wondering what went wrong; which brings me onto my main argument.


Despite our 'classless society', those who hold any position of power or is seated higher in the pecking order, for that matter, is automatically given a 'free pass' to run amock. Politicians, wealthy businessmen or anyone with substantial amounts of money can do nearly anything and the government will turn a blind eye. Think of all the conspiracies regarding industries or corrupt politicians that have been conveniently covered up over the years. People in power in power, stay in power, no matter what the costs. If that means letting someone else take the fall and suffer severe punishments (that these people could most likely buy their way out of regardless), then so be it. In retrospect, these criminals that I spoke of in the above paragraph are forced to endure incarnation for crimes that may have been far less severe than those who are bailed out by their fortunate wealth.


We live in a perfidious culture, surrounded by everyday mercenaries with the attitude of 'every man for himself'. People who are born into this First Class aristocracy are accepted as 'one of the boys' and are permitted to live above the law, whereas those who are not so fortunate are in a constant struggle to fight their way to the top; to chase this dream of 'Utopia'. Should I allow this fraudulent culture to corrupt me, or should I stand up against the odds and fight back; fight the very system that is trying to cage me… trying to convert me into the ‘individual’ it wants me to be.  

Welcome to My World

Some call me a textbook narcissist. I place myself above others, sustain wildly unrealistic expectations and quite frankly, feel I'm too brilliant for my own good. My ego is about as large as Jay Leno's chin and my vanity is unsurpassed by anyone I've yet had the displeasure of meeting. Hello, my name is Brad and I'm here to tell you of the excitement and adventure that is my life as a narcissitic misanthropist.

This blog represents what I admire the most in humanity; free speech. Freedom of speech is what makes us who we are, what shows us that we are not caged by society; not broken by the 'man'. It shows us that WE are in control. Whilst this blog shall start as a means of me letting loose all my anger and frustration through written communication, I hope to eventually potray my distain for the world in a more... Positive way; making jokes here and there and, in general, making a mockery of 'the system'. Overall, I believe this will symbolize my 'coming to terms' with the harsh realities of humanity... but, maybe not; who knows? I would also like to branch out into a more extensive 'blogging experience', writing game and movie reviews and perhaps providing my opinion on other aspects of modern society as opposed to just the flaws. In the meantime, however, you will simply have to put up with my little 'Brants' (patent pending) until such moment arrives.

 Xoxo Gossip Brad