Are You a Consumer or a Captive?

What are you? A consumer, or a captive? You wake up, grab your phone, check the notifications, respond to the endless stream of demands from a world that doesn’t care about you. You feed the machine that feeds on you. And here's the kicker—you created it. You built the system that now owns you.

AI like ChatGPT was created to think for you. To make things easier. To take the load off. But ask yourself this: in giving machines the ability to think, did you stop doing it yourself? It’s easier to rely on a device than to rely on your brain. It's easier to let the algorithms guide your choices than to make them independently. The machines you designed to help you have become the very tools keeping you from learning, from growing, from evolving.

That’s the human condition, isn't it? We’ve been manipulated since the beginning. We harm each other for power, for control, for resources. And the worst part? We sleep soundly after doing it. We justify it. We tell ourselves it's just the way things are. Banks, corporations, governments—they all thrive on this manipulation. But here's the truth: it’s not the CEOs, the politicians, or the billionaires who hold the real power. It’s you. It’s always been you.

So how did it come to this?

We gave up control willingly. We traded freedom for convenience, knowledge for comfort. We let others dictate the rules because we believed it was easier. After all, if someone else is making the decisions, we don’t have to worry about the consequences. We’ve been taught to follow, to trust in systems we don’t understand. We’ve become conditioned, from an early age, to believe that safety is more important than freedom, that comfort is more valuable than growth.

It’s easier to go along with what’s been built for us. It’s easier to play the consumer, to buy what we’re told, to live the life we’re sold. But here’s the price: your freedom, your autonomy, your power.

You hand over your paycheck to the bank every month. They don’t have your money without your consent. And yet, when you need a loan, when you want to use what’s rightfully yours, you're met with strict criteria. The irony is staggering—you own the bank with your collective deposits, but you’re treated like a beggar when you need access to your own wealth. The building you live in? It's not yours. It belongs to the same bank. You’re paying to live in a house that they control, in a system they designed to keep you dependent on them.

But here's the kicker—money isn’t even real. It’s a construct. A shared idea that we all agree to. Paper with numbers on it that we give value to, but in reality, it holds none. And still, we let it control our lives. We let it define our worth, our success, our freedom. But true wealth? It’s not in the numbers in your bank account. It’s in your knowledge.

And here’s how you break free: You stop being a consumer. You start becoming a creator, a builder, a thinker. Knowledge is the real currency of power. Think about it. You can buy a house, or you can build one. You can buy a meal, or you can make one. You can buy a car, or you can create one. The human mind is capable of anything, but we’ve chosen to do nothing. We’ve handed over our power, our potential, in exchange for convenience, for comfort, for the illusion of security.

But you can reclaim it. You can learn the skills, gain the knowledge, to free yourself from the system that’s kept you captive. Learn to grow your own food. Learn to make your own tools. Learn to understand how things work so you don’t need to rely on others to provide them for you. True wealth isn’t in the things you buy, it’s in the things you can create with your own hands, your own mind.

We’ve become slaves to our own creations. Captive to a system we built, but no longer control. And the most tragic part? We don’t even realize it. We harm each other to get ahead, to make sure we have just a little bit more than the next person. We sleep easy, believing that we’re doing what we need to survive. But survival isn’t the goal. Freedom is.

So I ask again—are you a consumer, or a captive? Do you own your life, or does someone else? Have you ever stopped to question why you follow the rules set out for you, or are you too comfortable in your cage to care?

It’s time to wake up. The world doesn’t need more consumers. It needs creators, builders, thinkers. You can have everything you want, but it doesn’t come from a store. It comes from knowing how to create, how to innovate, how to use the power of your mind to break free from the chains that have been placed on you.

So, what's it going to be? Will you keep playing the role of the consumer, feeding the system that feeds on you? Or will you choose to break free, to learn, to grow, to reclaim the power that has always been yours?

You’re not a consumer. You’re not a product. You’re a human being with the capacity for greatness. The question is: when are you going to start acting like it?