Will We Ever Change?

Perhaps it is age. Age seems to make me more realistic and perhaps a little cynical. It could be from a variety of things, including the slog of the past year. Maybe I am becoming a curmudgeon.

Last night we were watching basketball and on comes an ad from Adobe. The plotline is Mom makes ice cream, and kids spark her to build a business and boom, she’s killing it.  That’s not how it fucking works.  It pisses me off that these are the ads being pushed at Americans.  Look how easy it is! Jump in and create a consumer product which is one of the hardest businesses to get off the ground.

I love entrepreneurs.  I’ve backed them, and I am one myself.  I’m not employable.  I know that, and I’ve been able to navigate that with financial success. It’s in my blood.  I’m not convinced that entrepreneurship can be taught.  It’s an innate understanding of the world at large with the unstoppable desire to make that happen.  Risk doesn’t feel like a risk. It’s a gift.  

We should embrace all kinds of careers no matter what we do.  We all can’t be entrepreneurs, but we all need to pay the rent.  That’s reality.
We are living in a moment where everyone thinks they can be an entrepreneur.  The majority of ideas that people are working on are not new and will not get funded or succeed. That is a fact.

The biggest distortion of reality these days is the media. Can’t we stop foisting this type of advertising on the public?  Can’t we reach out and be socially responsible and at the same time build brands around that? I don’t want to see a woman become an ice cream maven while her kids just smile, and everything seems fantastic and rosy. I want to see that Adobe is helping others succeed with real stories, not this fake news.

It’s seriously time to change the narrative, and the media has tremendous control over it.  Generation Z and the generations that come next want to see something different, not the same type of ads that have been pushed at us for decades with just different characters and different content.

When you put lipstick on a pig, it is still a pig.