The Average American vs. Designer Distractions

As an average, everyday American wife and mom of two small children, my priorities start simply every day. I want to be a good mother, spend time with my kids, have a healthy marriage, keep up my home, and work together with my husband to protect our small portion of the American Dream. We are not rich. We are barely lower-middle class. We make just enough to not qualify for assistance, but barely enough to feel like we're doing anything other than scraping by.

This is not a unique situation. Our country is filled with families struggling just like mine.

Recently, my husband had a seizure. We found out he had a brain tumor and that he was going to have to have surgery to remove this very large brain tumor. It got me thinking about the time we have, the ways in which we use it, and how our country—and, in a larger sense, the world—has become a place where our time feels like it's being stolen.

I won't lie. I got angry thinking about how I would have to work every day up until my husband's surgery to remove a large brain tumor, while doctors were telling us there was a chance he could die or have serious complications afterward. It made me furious that he also had to work up until the point of this surgery. And it made me even angrier that, even while doing all of that, we were wasting precious time we should have been spending with our children.

Not to mention, FMLA doesn't mean you get paid—it simply means you have the privilege of going back to the meat grinder. You can't be fired, but you surely won't get any assistance from your corporate employer, who probably doesn't even know your name.

Normally, when I speak on the issue of affordability in America from the point of view of an "everyday American," I am met with a myriad of comments from the "boomer" perspective:

"Get a better job."

"Work harder."

"Stop complaining and start working for what you want."

"Adapt to your new situation. Start a business."

"Women should be at home with the children. Your husband's just lazy."(I agree women SHOULD be home with their children, but my husband isn't lazy—he's EXHAUSTED.)

"Go back to school and get a real job."

We DO work hard, like most Americans struggling right now. We DID do our best to plan and prepare. We DID start a business. We are trying to gain security and wealth. I went back to school to become a paralegal in hopes of being able to, at the very least, work from home—only to find out that AI was taking over the new role I was newly qualified for.

When Tim, my husband, had his surgery, and as he recovers now, we are navigating a new reality: he can't help provide right now, and I have to work both roles. I am keeping up the business, trying to create content and keep my small dream alive, and working to be the best mom to our kids.

I realized that there literally is not enough TIME for regular Americans to do all of these things necessary to be successful and change their circumstances.

Where did we go wrong, or did we?

Are all of us just lazy, entitled socialists looking for a handout and don't realize it? Or has the system changed? Have the elites in this country become so concentrated that there are no longer different wealthy people working toward different goals, but elites all focused on one primary goal: ensuring that our economy only works for them and that wealth and power remain in their hands?

The bigger question, and the point of this post, is: HOW? How are they doing this?

Now, I only speak from the common-sense perspective—emphasis on the common—of a regular American with a two-year college degree, but this is what I have observed.

Time is our most precious commodity, and time is being taken away from the average American.

We no longer have the time necessary to build wealth in the way our parents once did.

Our time is a resource that is not only valuable to us, but a resource that can be used to benefit and give more time to the wealthiest among us. If we think of it in regard to Thomas Sowell's definition of what an economy is, time is a resource that is scarce and can be allocated for different purposes.

We can use our time to educate ourselves, understand what is going on in the world, and form opinions based on an actual understanding of the subject matter. We can use our time to spend with loved ones—as parents raising our children, at soccer games and dance lessons, as providers and protectors. We can use our time to find faith, go to church, be involved in our religious communities, volunteer for programs, and give back to our communities.

The luckiest among us can use our time for hobbies and self-improvement—golfing, travel, hunting, fishing.

And finally, we can spend it earning money to fund and facilitate all of these other ambitions.

Our time is limited—we only have so much of it in a day, week, month, year, or lifetime. Each moment seems more fleeting the older you get. What seemed like it took hours as a child now flashes by in the blink of an eye.

There's never enough time.

Most people try to work hard to ensure that they and their families can afford to utilize their time in the best and most fulfilling ways possible.

Have we been cheated of time by the wealthiest among us?

We have all begun to realize, because it's becoming very obvious, that monetary wealth and power in this country—and really around the world—are concentrated among a very select few at the top.

Most of us are so busy we don't have the time to know who they are, what they do, or how they do it. But we are starting to realize that it seems more impossible for each generation to build its own wealth. The American promise of hard work paying off seems less and less guaranteed.

Millennials, Gen X, and now Gen Z have all started to voice their frustrations with the way our country is being run and with monetary wealth that seems to be not only concentrated at the top, but actively protected and controlled.

This is what happens when a select few become so powerful they can control everyone beneath them.

We're not talking about a boomer who worked his whole life and has a few million dollars in a retirement account. What I am talking about is the elite—the .00001% with generational wealth that goes back centuries, with enormous control over this country and the lives of regular Americans.

They have so much power and control that they have now begun to own our time—our most precious and valuable commodity.

If you feel like your mom used to have so much more time to accomplish things when you got home from school, you're not crazy.

Now, some conspiracy theorists (I wear that label like a badge of honor), including myself, think they have actually manipulated time and shortened our day. But there are simpler, more insidious ways these shadow elites have been able to take away and control our time.

By controlling our time—how we spend it, how much of it we have, and where it's focused—they essentially own it.

We're raised to be nothing but clock-punching ants.

Think about how much of your time you spend at your primary job. We're not encouraged to find unique ways to earn money. Throughout our primary education, we're never taught about generational wealth, wealth building, wealth management, or the stock market. In fact, most kids I have managed barely know how to count change.

I believe this is intentional.

They separate us from our families. Children begin by kindergarten, sometimes earlier, with an eight-hour day of "learning" through an education system controlled and regulated by our governments through systems put in place long ago by the elites who influenced them.

As we move into adulthood, we transition into the workforce, where we continue to be separated from our families with the eight-hour workday.

The traditional eight-hour workday your boomer parents or grandparents had is something very different from what we are asked to do now.

We are encouraged to be productive. Work harder. Achieve your goals. Have it all.

And then, with increases in technology, we're shown curated, fancy pictures of successful, smiling people in cute work attire, making lots of money and driving nice cars, with words in fancy fonts saying:

"Ten Best Tips for Success."

"How to Have It All."

"Why You Should Be Focused on Your Career for the Next 10 Years."

"How You Can Be a Millionaire."

"Why Most of Our Country Is Getting Richer While You're Not."

All of these pretty headlines are followed by captions, videos, or articles illustrating the idea that if you give your time to your job or career—if you sacrifice years to the corporate world—you can have it all later. You'll have security and a good life if you put in extra time, do extra work at home, sacrifice having children until you're in your thirties, get enough rest so you're productive (but not too much), and follow all the right steps.

You'll be wealthy like the rest of America.

And if you're not?

Here's what you're doing wrong.

"Stop whining. You're just not working hard enough."

Then we do all of the suggestions.

We give away years to college, just to be indoctrinated, and then we give away more years to jobs we hate, only to never move up or even get into the "careers we want." Then we're told we just need to work more.

The eight-hour workday has changed. It's no longer just sacrificing those eight hours. It's giving more time at home to hopefully, if you're lucky, get a raise, show your worth, answer emails, finish projects, or prove you're "committed."

But all the while, things keep getting more expensive.

Our stuff is getting less valuable and breaks more easily, which means you need to work more to afford replacements. Fifty years ago, our grandparents could have the same refrigerator for decades. Now, we have to be able to replace our fancy fridges in five years—if we're lucky—and if we can't, we're told, "You didn't budget well enough."

And the only way to ensure we have the money and aren't shamed by the "rest of the world"—or the fake bots that make the lies we're being told seem like everyone else is doing better than us—is to sacrifice more time for a paycheck that barely gets us by.

Pretty soon, we look up and poof.

We don't get to have children. The idea of family is gone. We will die alone with nothing but the memory of a job.

The more expensive things get, the less our money is worth, and the more time we have to sacrifice to have the same life our parents did.

I wish this was the only way they were stealing our time, but it's not.

Through improvements in technology and science, they began to introduce designer distractions.

Think about how much time we spend on our computers and phones.

How many times have you been out on a date with your husband and suddenly realized you have sat in silence while each of you stared into your respective screens?

Instead of reading books and expanding our minds, or reading about what's happening in the world around us and learning enough to think for ourselves, we have been conditioned to blindly consume makeup tutorials and AI cat videos.

Even social media platforms that were supposed to facilitate unfettered information through multiple viewpoints have become meticulously controlled by algorithms, fake accounts, AI bots, and manufactured engagement. The result is that we spend our time arguing with each other, distracted by an endless number of controversies, or feeling crazy because we're shouted down by a bunch of "people" claiming to represent the majority if we focus on something "they" don't want us to.

And all the while, we're wasting precious time.

The more time progressed, the more elaborate the designer distractions became.

The phone has been an insidious and evil distraction. I will find myself going to the bathroom to hide from my screaming children and barking dog, and then an hour later I am still scrolling...

I'm not proud of this, and I have been actively working on changing this terrible habit.

I know I am not alone in feeling like my phone reads my mind.

I find myself opening it to check my email, and then an article pops up about an herbal remedy for kidneys that my husband could most definitely use. After that, I see a video for a lawnmower, as if my phone knew I was just thinking about how stressed I am that I haven't been able to cut the grass since my husband had brain surgery.

Then the hour is gone.

Venture onto a platform like X, and the algorithms designed by these powerful tech oligarchs know exactly what to show you to keep you arguing over women in men's sports—something that should just be obviously ridiculous to all of us—or children being transitioned.

As if these powerful people are actually concerned with these ridiculous fights we're having.

There goes another hour.

The distraction itself becomes the point.

We are offered an overwhelming number of choices, arguments, controversies, videos, products, shows, notifications, headlines, apps, and opinions. There is always something else to watch. Something else to buy. Something else to be angry about. Something else we're supposedly supposed to care about right now.

Our attention is constantly being redirected.

And if our attention is constantly being redirected, so is our time.

Again, I wish this was the only way I thought they were doing this. I wish these few examples were the only ones I could think of where these elites are actively stealing our time. Alas, they are not.

These are just the most obvious ones.

Think about our hospital and medical systems. How long you wait to get an appointment, how much it costs, and how much time you spend buying prescriptions and taking them.

Think about the things we have learned are being put into our food and water—and this is just what a few people have been allowed to reveal.

If it feels like life expectancy for the average American isn't that long, it's because it isn't. The Bible describes human lifespans very differently, including extraordinarily long lifespans before the flood. Yet now we're supposed to accept that around 75 or 80 years is simply all the time we're supposed to get?

The pharmaceutical industry boasts an infamous record of stealing time from our country and the world. Combine that with designer drugs people use recreationally and the cartels pumping illegal, dangerous drugs into our communities for generations, and the years stolen from Americans alone are probably in the millions, if not billions.

Targeted devastation in communities like rural Appalachia makes me question whether powerful interests understood exactly what they were doing to communities filled with more free-minded, God-fearing people who were harder to manipulate and control.

The more substances that were prescribed and pumped into these communities, the more the death and prison toll rose. With each addicted person came another family destroyed, another life consumed, and another person whose time no longer belonged to them.

With every click, and every second we spend debating things that actually shouldn't be an argument at all, with every second we waste on indoctrinating education, and every hour we spend at work, we're handing over our time to the elites.

We're making them more money, giving them more power, and in the end, we're giving them our time so they have more of their own.

They don't just own our time. They steal it and use it to ensure they have it in abundance.

Those of us who reject the curated mainstream and call out what seem like obvious flaws in modern America are smeared as conspiracy theorists and nut jobs, buried by the algorithms, and dismissed by the bots.

Meanwhile, instead of expanding our minds, paying attention to the real things that are wrong with our country, being parents, going outside, worshiping God, learning how to build, create, invent, and use the land God gave us, or finding fulfillment and purpose beyond our "careers," we spend eight hours sleeping so we can be our most rested and "productive selves," eight more hours at our place of employment, and then even more time staring into our phones or working from home through those same phones and computers.

While we work, the .001%—the Epstein-class elites—gain time.

In America today, time is just another thing that has become a luxury.

If you have free time, use it wisely.

Never take a second for granted, because we need every minute to truly save the future for our children.

If you're on your phone, read. Research. Listen to things that expand your mind instead of things designed simply to consume your attention.

Teach yourself how to build wealth.

Build something.

Learn something.

Spend time with your children.

And most importantly, don't wait to have a family. Use Sundays to worship God. Find every second you can to be with God and your family.

Because maybe the most rebellious thing an average American can do in a world designed to own our attention is to take ownership of our time again.