Gary Vee is a Product of Toxic Capitalism
He is a hero to many because society is sick
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I give Gary Vee a lot of shit, and maybe he doesn’t deserve all the hate because he’s not wrong in a lot of things. I credit him for getting my mentally ill 49-year-old ass out of a rut and out there chasing dreams of being a creator. He told me that it is never too late to go after what I want in life, and you know what — I needed his brand of tough love to convince the bugaboos in my head to fuck off.
I was hustling anyway, but at all the wrong things, and at least he set me on a path doing something I love.
But I also think some of what he says is harmful and he is a product of toxic capitalism. I think the message he pushes is harmful to many — people like me who push ourselves to succeed despite being mentally unfit for it.
But don’t worry; he doesn’t need you sticking up for him; he is perfectly fine with being the focus of so much anger and the poster boy for hustle porn. He is a big boy, and I doubt anything I have personally ever said about him has affected him one way or another. He is a person who can take a stand and be firm about what he believes.
Gary doesn’t back down, and I love that about him. I don’t think I have ever seen him back peddle and apologize for saying what he preaches and that takes a special kind of person. Gary knows that spreading his message and being irritable and dismissive about people who don’t believe what he does will not make everyone a fan.
He had to break a few eggs to get where he is today.
He knows there will always be people like me who want to tell him to go screw with his message of the hustle and grind. There is a growing movement of people who have grown tired of performing like circus monkeys for capitalism and are sick of everyone expecting us to give up our lives to work for the promise of a reward later.
Gary has wide appeal because people still want to believe they can be a billionaire if they work hard for a few years. They still believe it’s possible to get their pile of jewels to sit on like the 1% who hoard their wealth and stick it in offshore accounts. What they don’t realize is that the billionaire dragons from Facebook, Amazon, and Tesla don’t want you having their treasure and will do everything they can to ensure that you stay a slave to hustle culture.
Hustle culture makes them richer every day.
They want you to work yourself to tears so you can afford your driverless car and another smart speaker so you can talk to Alexa. They want you to buy courses and hire wealth coaches because they will always get their share.
They want you eating shit sandwiches until you hit 45 and realize you wasted your life working, but you’ve already come this far, so you might as well buy another iPhone and drown your sorrows in $7 coffee at Starbucks and a night of Netflix on the couch — until you hit retirement age and realize you still don’t have a nest egg and you can’t retire.
Gary says a lot of profound things that are true, but he is still a shill, helping the rich to sell their brand of snake oil and making people believe they can beat a system that wants to keep them down.
The wealthy are spending trillions to make sure there will always be a cheap workforce in place to make the widgets they sell. They convince us to take out thousands in student loans to train us to be obedient memorizers of information that can take direction and put up with anything as long as we can pay our bills. They want us on the hook, paying back those loans so we won’t be complaining that we keep working and not getting anywhere.
Once we land our “dream” jobs, they convince us to hustle so we can take on a mortgage, a new car, and all the technology our credit cards will support.
Some will think they can beat the system and follow people like Gary, who tell them to hustle in their own businesses if they want to get ahead. They build their personal brands on every social media platform and engage with people they hope will one day become customers. They create content for blogs and podcasts, to get people to come and click on the ads and buy our shitty courses. They build sales funnels and opt-in pages, and mailing lists trying to find their 1000 true fans.
They hustle through their 20s, 30s, and 40s, missing out on life so they can retire and travel in their golden years, only to realize they are too damn tired from the hustling and all they want to do is sleep.
Yes, people like Gary Vee have some good things to say, but mostly they try to sell us the American Capitalist Dream, funding their own capitalist dreams. They get inside our heads by appearing to be one of us, dropping f-bombs, and appealing to aggressive people with a sense of entitlement.
If your first reaction to my rant is to dismiss me, call me names, and stick up for Gary and his ilk, you may not have gotten to that point yet where you are tired of all the ugliness that swarms around toxic capitalism and still believe that wasting your life chasing after money is a worthwhile use of your entire life.
My problem is not with Gary Vee, the person, because, in truth, I like the guy and would love to hang out and drink a few glasses of wine with him. My problem is with the tired-out message that fulfillment comes from making money and wasting our lives running around in circles trying to catch the Benjamin that is on a string tied to a pole like a carrot, urging us to work harder, so the rich get richer.
I get it; everyone must work. We have bills and mouths to feed. But the problem is that we will be stuck in the vicious earning cycle that the wealthy have created for us until we are no longer useful and become a liability instead of an asset.
We are going to devote our lives to hard, meaningless work that takes up so much of our time we don’t even have the energy to fight back against the status quo.
So, tell me to fuck off and that I don’t understand Gary’s complex message. You can choose to believe people like me, who are sounding the warning about capitalism, with no irons in the fire and nothing to gain. Or you can believe the guys like Gary who have everything to gain by you buying into their bullshit and spending your hard-earned money financing their American Capitalist Dreams.
Bottom line, I don’t hate Gary, and I don’t think he is intentionally misleading people. Gary is just trying to get his piece of treasure in this sick and twisted monetary system followed worldwide.
You don’t have to continue to trade your life and time needlessly in the race for money. You don’t need to hustle and grind on social media, build coaching programs and courses, and create useless content to lure people into your funnels, so you can make a buck off the backs of all the other people who are a slave to the rich.
When you are ready, you will understand it’s time for change — for revolution. I hope you don’t wait until you are old and have wasted your entire life as I did, chasing after the dream of being a billionaire. Because, no matter what I had in life, it was never good enough, I always wanted something different and better. I wanted the things that only a lot of money can buy and I was willing to put my health and sanity on the line to do it.
I hope it’s not too late for you because at almost 54 years old I feel like a washed-up loser, who spent all his young years hustling — instead of trying to do something about his mental illness — and lost everything because of it.
I hope you can see just how damaging it is to put your life on hold to hustle and grind. Now, it’s all I know and I fear it’s too late to change.
Do yourself a favor, think about what you are doing with your life and make better choices accordingly. Do it before it’s too late.
