Fantasy vs Reality - Do We Have a Choice?

                                 

The more I observe the workings of the world, the more I realize the hold money has and the influence it has on all aspects of our lives.  The people that decide what we wear by creating the clothes, the corporations that decide what we eat because they make the food, the companies that decide what we think because they write the films and music.  Do we really know what we're getting into?  Do we question the intent of the ones shaping our world?  Are we really making our own choices in life of what we believe and what we want?

I feel that it's important to realize that money is the object for much of the large corporations of the world.  They want to create what sells and makes the most profit.  They are not concerned with helping us be healthier. or more satisfied or grow in morality.  The food industry in America for example, is all about producing food at a low cost and turning a profit - at the expense of so many things - our health, our environment and living creatures.

Much of the media takes no thought to encouraging moral standards or helping people to live a satisfied life.  They create dream worlds, things we wish were real.  They keep us hungry for these ideas.  How life really is, how relationships really are, the things people believe and do are easily skewed to make a story more interesting and attractive, therefore people will spend their money on it.
Commercials portray images that are nothing like the food itself, they exaggerate how you'll feel when you eat the food they're advertising.

I think it is very easy and common for people to believe what they see on the screen as an accurate portrayal of the rest of the world, but it's not.  Personally, whenever I relate to the world something I believed from the media, I see people look at me in confusion because it's not the way things are!

Music is the same.  When I hear the latest, most popular music,  I can't help but wonder how much of it is actually based off an artist's experiences or a dream world the writers are trying to make money off of.  I feel really bad for kids who are allowed to listen to much of the popular music these days. They know it word-for-word and are growing to believe the things it says when life is so (thankfully) different than that.

Magazines do it too. Models and photography, computer edited pictures make people look a certain way - looks that are impossible to achieve without constant work and sacrifice of quality of life. Thankfully this subject is getting talked about more lately.   Again, we buy the magazines because they are beautiful.  We see these things and think we are lacking something.  We don't realize how good real life is anymore.

We're all being set up for disappointment, unsatisfaction and influence towards things that destroy us.  We see this stuff and we think "if the people on the screen do it or have it, then I should too".
I'm only speaking out of my own experience and observations.

My solution to this, is I am going to decide who I really want to be and I'm going to look at and listen to the things that encourage me to be that.  I'm going to work at learning about life for-real and not get caught up in the portrayal of something only meant to entertain a fantasy.