Everything is Bullsh*t Except You

Trust is at a premium right now. But it’s also lost. Lost inside vapid culture and exaggerated happenstance. Everything is bullsh*t. You know it. I know it. Let’s just admit it. Let’s look each other in the eye and agree. And when we do, let’s ignore each other. Because the only person we can trust right now is us.

I’m not saying your mom is bullsh*t. I mean, she might be, but she might not be also. But even if you don’t think your mom is bullsh*t, she may be spending her days getting inundated with targeted advertisements intended to persuade her. Or encourage her in a certain direction. Because that’s everything right now.

All of our information is in the popcorn popper. We are being constantly surveilled under the guise of safety. But in reality these Silicon Valley behemoths are hijacking our brains in order to market to us. Because that’s what people pay them for. To get inside our brains. To propose something to us before we think of it. And if that’s not bullsh*t, I don’t know what is.

Don’t tell me it’s the free market. Or capitalism. Or fair trade. Or just how technology has developed. It doesn’t matter. It was our fault. We gave away all of our information and now there is no way to take it back. Even when we disengage or delete social media all we get is a confirmation email and a broken link. We don’t have any assurance that our information was purged and we never will. That’s bullsh*t.

A Loss of Control

We’ve lost control. Our daily lives are a constant parade of short-form advertisements and retargeting. And it’s nothing new, but it’s just so f*cking pervasive that we barely even realize it anymore. And all of that stuff is the problem. Everything we see is slanted. Few things are spammed at us for an honest opinion. Everyone is trying to sell us something.

Everyone is advertising to us at all times. On billboards. On the Internet. On buildings. On people. I can’t even watch a clip of kittens playing without suffering through an advertisement for the next horsesh*t “blockbuster” movie that is just a remake of something done three years ago.

I don’t have control, neither do you. We walk through life with a constant stream of diabolically targeted ephemera pointed at our brains. And we accept it because…technology. I may have accepted it in the past, but more and more I am rejecting it. Opting for quieter options with less devious noise.

Only you have the control to say no. No to the bullsh*t. No to the constancy. Only you. It’s time to trust yourself above all else. Because if you don’t, you are soon going to forget what free will really feels like.

Trusting Your Gut

It’s not just about kombucha when it comes to your gut. Your gut is your interior defense mechanism to the cacophony of bullsh*t that follows you around all day. It tells you when something isn’t right. The problem is that we don’t trust ourselves enough to listen. And when we don’t, we often pay for it later. Oftentimes directly out of our wallets.

We worry about pleasing strangers more than ourselves and in doing so we give away the power of our gut to help us. We feel it, but we ignore it. We allowed all of this. We acquiesced to it because it was easier and because there were substantial “benefits” to social networking. But we didn’t know about all the bullsh*t when we signed up. And now many of us are stuck in the endless cycle of humblebrags and content marketing. All because we didn’t trust our gut.

The first time you connected Facebook to another site to make things more “streamlined,” your gut probably told you something was fishy. When you save your credit card somewhere online, your gut tells you not to, even in the face of encryption protocol and bla bla, whatever the hell doesn’t protect our data at all. But we ignore our own gut and in doing so we fail to trust ourselves above all else.

Everything is Bullsh*t

Fake news and propaganda. Politics in general. Retargeting. Predictive Analytics. Mass advertising. The pharmaceutical industry. Silicon Valley. It’s all bullsh*t. For every positive benefit there are hundreds of back door lies and falsehoods promulgated.

Basketball jerseys with company logos. The check engine light in my car. Internet dating. The 13 previews I have to watch before I see a movie I can’t even remember I am seeing anymore. It’s all because it’s never enough money. Never enough profit. They want more.

Amazon and their tax breaks. Facebook every single fcking day with another “oops.” 12 steps to delete an account. Every pyramid scheme out there being marketed to help you. Charities acting as shell corporations. Your dog’s genetic markers. Everything is bullsh*t.

Trust Yourself Above All Else

We let it get away from us. There is really no going back now. But if we stop giving away our trust (and data) like it’s expendable, maybe we can start protecting ourselves better. Maybe we can protect our children better than we have protected ourselves.

And that’s why we have to put the onus back on us. You. Me. It’s time that you start trusting yourself again. You know everything is bullsh*t. Maybe it’s time to stop playing the game.