Aren’t We Better Than This?

Aug 7

Written By J Mink

There’s a quiet ache echoing through our culture, one we’ve learned to drown out with noise, but never fully mute. It rises between scrolls and clicks, between the curated grin and the influencer detox, between the overpriced skincare and the startup pitch deck. It’s the hum beneath the hustle. A question, persistent and sharp:

Is this all we’ve become?

We live in an age where money has eaten meaning. Where the only thing more fragile than truth is the human soul. Where everything, everything, has a price tag, a brand partner, and a CTA. It’s not just that we’ve commodified our labor. We’ve commodified our selves. Our beauty, our children, our grief, our hope. Our joy is monetized; our trauma is trending. If it doesn’t sell, it doesn’t matter.

We used to create because we had to. Because something burned inside us, and the only way to survive it was to turn it into song, or clay, or color. Now we create for content calendars and brand alignment. We used to write to be read. Now we write to be optimized.

Art has become a funnel.

The pursuit of money is not inherently corrupt, but the way we’ve centered it has corrupted everything. Money used to be a means to build something durable, something useful, something beautiful. Now, it’s the end. The God. The algorithmic deity to which we sacrifice nuance, intimacy, and integrity.

The startup world is a perfect example. Once a haven for innovation, it has become a graveyard of soulless minimum viable products, designed not to last, but to exit. Founders chase valuation, not value. Impact is just a bullet point. Disruption is aesthetic. Purpose is packaging.

The worst part? We know this. We know. And still we play along.

Because to step outside the system is to risk irrelevance. And in a culture like ours, irrelevance is worse than death.

Relationships have not fared better. Once, love was sacred, not because it was perfect, but because it was honest. Raw. Mutual. Built on connection, not currency. But today’s dating scene is transactional, performative, and bruised. Apps have turned attraction into inventory. Intimacy into leverage. Romance into a slideshow of strategic angles and emotionally distant flirtations.

We don’t fall in love. We brand ourselves into compatibility.

We don’t commit. We negotiate access.

We don’t ask “Do you see me?” We ask “Do I increase your status?”

Even our heartbreaks feel templated now; clean aesthetics, vague captions, a quick rebrand to something softer and stronger. Vulnerability is a genre. Pain is a reel. Growth is a reframe.

Connection has been replaced by control.

What about virtue?

Surely that still matters?

Not anymore. We’ve hollowed out virtue and stuffed it with optics. We don’t live values. We broadcast them. We are a nation of self-declared “good people” who mistake rhetoric for action and awareness for change. Virtue has become so performative, so strategically weaponized, that sincerity is indistinguishable from strategy.

Caring isn’t cool. It’s cringe. Unless it comes with a logo, a filter, and a link in bio.

We walk past poverty to film it. We don’t stop corruption; we fundraise off of it. We call ourselves allies but hoard our proximity to power like it’s credit in a game we’re winning. It’s all one big dress rehearsal for who we want to be seen as, not who we are.

Even morality has a brand now. And a PR team.

So what are we left with?

A culture of billboards pretending to be people.

A society of optics over ethics.

Of presence without presence.

Of talent buried under marketing plans and mediocrity draped in designer.

You can buy your way into almost anything now. Influence. Relationships. Even admiration. But you cannot buy depth. You cannot purchase soul.

And soul is what we’re starving for.

Because somewhere beneath the noise and metrics, we remember. We remember what it felt like to create something that didn’t need approval. To love without keeping score. To build without needing to brand. We remember what it felt like to care without fear of being seen as weak.

We remember the point.

And that’s the thing. We could turn back. We could choose something else. Something real. But first, we would have to admit what we’ve become:

Addicted to attention.

Afraid of irrelevance.

Too distracted to be alive.

The world does not need more “creators.” It needs makers. It needs people willing to put something true into the world without knowing if it will be applauded. It needs souls unafraid of depth. People who work not for optics, but for outcomes. For beauty. For meaning.