Transcription
In 1973, an artist named Richard Sarah made a short film with a single scrolling message across the screen. It said, "It is the consumer who is consumed. You are the product of television. You are delivered to the advertiser who is the customer. He consumes you."
Now, that was over 50 years ago, and somehow it's gotten worse. And I mean way worse. So, I think we all know that companies want our money. But something I've been thinking about a lot recently is that they don't even want your money. Like that's not even the main goal anymore. They want something that is much more valuable.
What they really want, what the whole economy is based on right now is your attention because they know that once they have your attention, then the money will follow. And the scary part is most of us don't even know that this is happening. The average American sees somewhere between 4,000 and 10,000 advertisements every single day. And in 1970, that number was about 1,600. So 50 years later, we went from seeing ads to literally swimming in them. They're on your phone. They're on your email. They're disguised as content. They follow you from website to website like a stalker with a credit card machine.
Here's the thing that most people don't realize. All of those free apps on your phone, talking Instagram, Facebook, even YouTube, they're not actually free. You are paying for them with something that is more valuable than money. You're paying for it with your life, with your attention.
In 2022, Google made over $224 billion in ad revenue. Meta, that's Facebook and Instagram, made $17 billion. Together, those two companies captured more than half of every digital ad dollar spent on the planet. >> Wow. Okay. >> And global ad spending just passed $1 trillion. Like, think about that. a trillion dollars just being spent to capture your attention long enough to sell you something.
Now, there's this quote that I love that says, "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product." I used to think this is a little bit dramatic, but this is actually true like 95% of the time. And like, it's literally just math. Like when you open Tik Tok or you open Instagram, its algorithm was literally designed by some of the smartest people on the planet not to educate you, not to entertain you, but to do one simple thing, and that is to keep you scrolling as long as humanly possible. And the reason for that is so that it can show you ads and they can make money. That's literally the whole business model.
Tristan Harris, he's a former design enthusiast at Google, described this as the race to the bottom of the brain stem. In fact, his words are, "It's not enough that you use the product consistently. I want to >> dig down deeper into the brain stem and implant inside of you an unconscious habit so that you are being programmed at a deeper level. You don't even realize it." >> I know it sounds like it, but that's not even a conspiracy theory. That's literally a guy who helped build the system. And he is telling you they are not just competing for your attention. They are trying to design your behaviors to make them money.
The average person now spends around 7 hours a day looking at a screen. And Gen Z is almost 9 hours. One in five people check social media within 5 minutes of waking up. I even fall into this sometimes. And if you're honest with yourself, you probably do too. Last thing you see when you go to bed, first thing you see when you wake up, that's programming that you are almost choosing to do to yourself. And all of that time is you being monetized. You're not even the customer. You never were. You are the product.
All right. Now, most of us think that we love buying stuff because of the things you buy. Like you get a new pair of shoes and you feel happy cuz you got the new pair of shoes. Like that's kind of what I assumed. Like we actually want stuff. But that's not actually what is happening in your brain. In fact, neuroscience shows that dopamine, which like is the, you know, the feelgood whatever is actually released right before you buy stuff. Not when you have the thing that you wanted the whole time. Like what we really love is the chase for the thing, the anticipation of having that object of our desire. It's the scrolling. It's the adding to the cart. It's waiting for your thing to get shipped to you. Maybe even the first moment that you open the box and then it's just all downhill from there.
In fact, a study found that 76% of Americans say that they're more excited when their online purchases arrive in the mail than when they buy something at the store. And that's not because online shopping is better. It's because the wait, the anticipation, that is where the dopamine lives. And the delay is actually the drug. And once you see this, you cannot unsee it. Every add to cart, every three left in stock, every your your item is shipped and it's on the way. That is just building up your anticipation. They're not actually selling you the product. They are selling you the feeling. And as soon as you have the product, that feeling fades.
Now, psychologists call this a hedonic treadmill. You buy something, you feel great for a day, maybe even a week, and then you're back to baseline pretty much. So, you need the next thing and then the next thing. And each time the high is a little shorter, and the spend is just a little bit more because you're just chasing that same high. In fact, this is the same pattern that you see in actual addiction. A study at BMP psychology literally compared it to a drug dependency saying many people become caught up in the addictive cycle of spending and consumption spending ever-increasing amounts of money in search for an ever-declining reward.
Now I don't want to come across here like I am immune to this. I've been through this cycle many times and I feel like it's it's once you become conscious of it that you can step out. But I used to have like a video game addiction where I would spend, you know, maybe just $5 on this game called The Hobbit where it's like you're building this little world. And eventually I was spending like $300 a month on this stupid game and rose right up to the top. But I was just chasing that dopamine. I did the same thing with cars. Even the the Tesla that I got once I hit half a million subscribers, which was like my goal for a long time. I loved that chase of trying to hit a goal and then get a reward. But as soon as I got it, I realized it's just a car. Like it didn't make me happier. It It's kind of fun. I like it, but like it doesn't impact my life one bit. And a week later, it's just a thing that gets you from point A to point B.
But this is how they get you. It's not with one big purchase. It's with thousands of small ones. Maybe it's just one or two small things per day that are easy to justify and don't really even feel like anything at the time. Now, the average American makes 107 emotional purchases every year. These are not planned purchases. These are emotional ones. That adds up to $4,600 a year. 45% of those are triggered by a bad day at work. 17% are triggered by doom scrolling. Yeah, there's actually a term like we know what's happening. Doom scrolling is literally a thing that we invented for ourselves and we still do. And the thing is it's so sneaky. Like you're just feeling anxious about work or your relationship or whatever and you can just doom scroll and then you see something you you buy it and it just makes you feel a little bit better. And now you just trained yourself to when I feel bad, I go through this cycle and I spend money. And by the way, people regret about a third of those purchases. So the average person is spending about $5,000 a year in order to feel good for about 23 minutes. So literally uh insane.
Now, I know I've been bad-talking a lot of companies, and that's actually about to get way worse in a second where they're purposefully stealing from you. But I want to be clear that there are genuinely good companies out there, good products out there. And I don't want to sound like a hypocrite. Honestly, I I do have sponsors on this channel. Without sponsorships, I don't even generally run a profit. But my barometer is generally I only work with ones that I would recommend to my mom. So, for instance, like Chime, the sponsor of this video, they have products that I've been using for years that are actually good and make you money and save you money. If you don't know Chime, they're America's number one choice for banking. They offer you smarter ways to manage your money. And the main one that I've literally been using for 10 plus years is a high-yield savings account. So, if you have your money in a normal checking account or savings account, you're going to earn generally under a percent. I I remember getting like pennies. But with Chime, you can earn 3.75 APY on your savings. So, like an emergency fund when you're saving up for investing, anything like that, I always always keep it in a high-yield savings account cuz if you're not, you're literally just missing out on essentially free money. Chime also has a cashback card where you can get 5% cash back on a category of your choice, which is really significant. And of course, it only makes sense if you're paying off the card at the end of every single month, but this is like a no-brainer. Plus, you can get like a $100 bonus when you open up a Chime checking account through my link down in the description. If you're not taking advantage of some of these tools, like a high-yield savings account, you're just leaving money on the table. So, check out Chime. There's a link down in the description. Take advantage of some of these same things that I do and we'll go back outside.
But that's the thing. This isn't just about your brain. The entire system is designed to keep you buying and it has been for a really long time. In 1924, a group of small companies, Philips, Osram, General Electric, formed a secret agreement called the Phoebus Cartel. At the time, light bulbs lasted about 2500 hours, and these companies got together and agreed to reduce the lifespan to just 1,000 hours. They were actually fining each other if their light bulbs lasted too long. Now, they actually marketed this as improved efficiency, and their sales went up 25%. This is the whole idea of planned obsolescence. And it never really stopped. In fact, it just accelerated.
Like today, your phone is engineered to slow down after about 3 years. And your printer tells you that the cartridges are empty when they're still like 20 to 40% full. Even clothes used to be worn dozens of times or hundreds of times. And now the average piece of clothing gets worn 7 to 10 times before it is thrown away. In fact, 85% of all textiles end up in landfills.
And then there are the subscriptions. The average American spends about $219 a month on subscriptions. But the crazy thing is when you ask them how much they spend, what they guess is $86, which is a 2.5 times gap between what they think that they pay and what we actually pay. 42% of people have completely forgotten about a subscription that they are being charged for because that's how they're designed. That is the whole point. Autopay just removes the pain and then you don't check your bank account. You don't budget. You don't do anything like that. So there's no friction for the money to just be siphoned out of your account. And again, I have to keep going back to this. We trade our lives for money. So it's sucking your life away from you one tiny piece at a time without you even feeling it.
In fact, I made a 7-day financial reset that is completely free. There's a link down below. And usually for average people who go through this, you will save between one and like $5,000 over the course of a year just by getting a hold of your finances and buckling down on some of this stuff. I'll leave a link down below.
And it's not just subscriptions. Everything is kind of designed to make spending invisible. Like you have buy now pay later. You're financing your TVs and your iPhones for 72 months. So it's just $16 a month. It's just $27 a month. You're no longer even having to swipe a card to pay for the thing or hand somebody cash that you took out of an envelope. It's just numbers moving around. And as this progresses further and further, it becomes easier and easier for you to spend money that you don't even have on things you you don't even super want. Definitely don't need them.
All right. So, here's a number that should absolutely stop you in your tracks. Total US credit card debt right now is $1.27 trillion. That is the highest it's been since they started tracking it. The average household carrying a balance owed is about $11,000 at an average interest rate of almost 23%. Someone making minimum monthly payments on that is going to be paying $18,000 in interest alone before paying that off. And that's if they don't spend any more money on it, which who's doing that? And 49% of Americans, so half, say that carrying credit card debt, this is just normal. It's just what everybody does. It's not a bad thing. It's just part of life. And this is how the system was designed. This is how it works. Everybody's using debt. It's not a bad thing to have debt. It's okay if you have some debt. You should treat yourself. You worked hard. Enjoy this.
By the way, if you're sick of this stuff, too, feel free to drop a like down below. When you engage with videos like this, it really pushes them out to more people. And my goal is for it to actually become more of a movement and actually impact these companies so that they stop literally trying to sabotage our brains.
But something is starting to change and honestly this has been really encouraging for me to see over the past couple years and it's really exploded recently. It's something they're calling like the no-buy rebellion. There's actually a couple names for it and it's not just like a hashtag like there is hashtags on Instagram and TikTok or whatever but it is becoming a trend to opt out of this consumerism trap and it's actually gotten over 10 million shares on TikTok alone which is really encouraging to see and it's all just people saying I'm done you know I am done buying things I don't need I'm done giving up my life for stuff I'm done being manipulated I'm done being the product I'm done.
And the funny thing is this underconsumption core is literally just like going back to basics of like human existence before this got destroyed in the past 100 years. It's literally wearing your jacket and your clothes more than the average of seven times like using the stuff you have until it doesn't work anymore. Novel idea, nobody's doing it. Look at the numbers. Like I feel like this is crazy, but this is how far we've gotten that being normal, just not overconsuming, just buying enough things to do the things that you need them to do, not upgrading when you don't need to, is now like a rebellion. It's now a movement. It's now a trend to just be not insane, to just like be normal.
And this isn't just like weirdos like me who are, you know, into saving money and minimalism. It's Gen Z. It's millennials. It's women who are tired of being targeted by the beauty industry. It's men that are realizing you don't need a flashy car and designer shirts or a Rolex in order to be a a good person, a good father, to have self-worth. In fact, there's stories about people doing no-buy years and paying off $50,000 worth of debt inside of a year just by simply not consuming.
56% of Americans right now have less than $1,000 in their savings account. And that used to be me, but I would challenge most of you to try a no-buy month, maybe a no-buy year if you need to go extreme, and see what happens to your finances. I remember the first time I did this, it just felt like an awakening, and it was very shocking to see how many things I was just buying because like, oh, I kind of need that thing. There's always a justification. It becomes a habit. And a lot of these things, they serve like little needs. But are they necessary for survival? Do they change your day-to-day happiness? No, they don't at all. You survived your entire life without them. You don't need them now. And sometimes all we need to do is to just back up for a little bit, just to take a month and not use your credit card. I feel like it's only once you opt out that you can kind of stop reacting and start making decisions.
In fact, there's this concept in psychology called the "keeping up with the Joneses" effect. A French philosopher in the 1700s got a beautiful new robe as a gift. And suddenly like everything in his house started looking shabby by comparison. So he replaced his desk and then he replaced his chair and then his curtains and one person led to another until he had spent far more than he could afford. All because one new thing made everything else feel inadequate. And honestly, that's the whole game. In every product launch, in every ad, just actually like watch them think about the psychology that they're using on you. It's what every new and improved label is trying to do. It's to try to make you feel that what you have isn't enough. And the solution is to keep buying.
But here's what I found. I have gone from being broke to being able to leave my job at 24, being extremely frugal in order to make that happen, falling into consumerism traps, and then really making some big shifts in my life, and being able to reach financial freedom in my 20s. And I have made a lot of these mistakes that I'm talking about here. I don't want you to think that I'm better than this or anything. And I'll tell you one thing that I really have started doing now is be very selfish with my time. Be very selfish with my attention and my money. And not like in what I think is a bad way, but like I said earlier, we trade our time for money. We go to work, we give somebody hours of our lives in order to get some dollars, and then we pay off all of our stuff. And let's say you make $10,000 a month, but then you have a house payment, a car payment, you have insurance, you have food, you have all these expenses. Now you're down to maybe $500 or $1,000 left. And this number could be higher, it could be lower. It depends on if you have a family, whatever. But when you spend $100, you think, "Oh, I earn $100 an hour. I earn $50 an hour. It's not a big deal." But realistically, all those other expenses have to come out first. So you're trading days or weeks of your life for random crap that doesn't matter because you're getting manipulated at the stem of your brain, right? It's literal insanity. You're being monetized by your attention. You're being monetized by spending your money. You're getting stolen from on subscriptions you don't even know that you have.
But I don't want to end this on a negative note. You are in control of all of these things. You can decide to opt out. You can quit social media. You can unsave all of your credit cards online to make it just way harder to spend money. It's super annoying. It's generally not worth it. You can do things that I I've done and do some investing and do huge sacrifices so that you can invest as early as possible. Let compound interest work on your side. You could start your own business that you have control over that nobody can fire you from. You could use your attention every day to create things instead of consuming them. Ultimately, the choice is ours. We've chosen to be consumers. you can choose to opt out.
If you want more videos like this, feel free to drop a like and subscribe. I try to only put out stuff that actually helps people. And if what you need right now is to stop consuming, to like never watch a video of mine again, I don't care. But I mean, there's positive products, positive content, but I think most of those things are a small minority. I'm trying to fit in there. But I think most of the stuff out there is just designed to steal from you. And I don't know about you, but I'm done with that.