What do you want to be when you grow up?

CW and I got cable back. Nope, we didn't even make it a whole year. Yup, hundreds of channels and thousands of commercials now flood into our home every day.

We were sitting on the couch one night this week, basking in the glory of the most passive of entertainment, and suddenly I snapped.

“What the fuck is up with all these commercials?!?”

“We were used to just two per break on Hulu, and short ones,” CW replied in his typical calm fashion.

“Well what the fuck?? Do you have any idea how many hours of marketing we’ve just consumed? How many millions of dollars were invested in those hours to try to manipulate our brains in the most cost effective way to get us to buy shit we don’t need or that’s going to rot our innards??”

“Shh, 1000 Ways To Die is back on.”

That’s basically how the conversation went.

There are days when I envision my future thusly: I’m a manager or mid-level type person in a marketing department or at a hip marketing firm in Boston, tracking web analytics for our various campaigns, pushing reports up to my bosses, talking to designers about what’s new, managing underlings doing data entry and teaching them about the magic of marketing.

Of course, I’d probably be making good money doing that. And, ideally, I’d find a marketing job for products that are awesome, helpful, and improving society and the world. But really, how many of those products are there? More likely, I’d wind up helping some evil corporation sell worthless shit to dumbasses.

That’s not a very happy dream.

I think I’d be pretty good at that sort of job, but over the last few months, that vision of the future has popped into my head less and less often. Instead, I want to tell people that stuff and shopping wont make them happy, and neither will TV or cruising the internet vacantly. That’s the opposite of marketing.

I’m sick of the jargony, pretentious, oh-so-happy marketing and social media stuff I have flowing into my Google reader every day. Yeah, technology is cool, but only in so much that it makes people’s lives better. Not in how much money it gets people to spend.