The Sweet, But Fake Happy – manipulating young minds

Have you ever had a really good bowl of cereal? I mean really, really good ones, tasty, crunchy, just right. You have, haven't you? I'm betting you were in your pj's, at home, probably watching cartoons.
When I think about really tasty cereal, I think back to the sleepovers I used to have with my cousins, how we'd all eat cereal and drink hot cocoa in the morning.

Don't you miss those days? Well, worry not, your time has finally come!

There's a place you can go, called the Cereal Crunch Cafe, where they give you all those wonderful, childhood feelings back!
It'll be cutesy, and intentionally baby-ish (but still kinda adorable) and they let you take as many pictures as you want and post them on Instagram and Snapchat....oops, not much like childhood, is it?

I know, I know, but you can at least seem cool to your equally clueless friends!

I discovered this 'wonderful' place, this past weekend, when a friend suggested we go there to catch up. I'd been blisfully unaware of its existence until then. When I first heard the name, I remember thinking 'You've got to be kidding me, it can't just be..'

But yeah, it's just a place where they sell milk and cereal. Correction, they see grossly overpriced milk and cereal.
Not the cheap kind you can buy at the store, either, but the more expensive ones, horribly pumped with sugar and food coloring. And more sugar!

My friend ended up paying 7 dollars for a bowl of cereal, a bottle of green milk (It's cuter on Instagram that way, trust me), and some other crap, like M&M's, Oreos and Kinder Bueno bits jammed in over the cereal.
This whole meal would cost about 2 dollars, if you bought all of these sweets at the store. And who eats that many sweets anyway?
I'm no saint or diet-nut, but my mind's throwing up just looking at the pictures.
Oh, and speaking of pictures – aren't they something?

Just look at the girl with the braid-things – I wonder how much time she spent doing her hair at home, just so she could come to this fraud of a place and take a picture?
Because that's why these kids come to such a place – because it's cool. When we arrived, we were greeted by a very preppy, cheery young girl who started explaining the different types of cereal to us. Dude, it's cereal, not physics.
At some point, she even turned to my friend and went 'I bet you're really confused right now'. And my friend nodded, in that annoying 'I'm so dumb, it's cute' attitude. Why? What's cute about being confused by cereal?
I don't know, but apparently, Instagram thinks it is.

The girl at the counter even told us 'Oh, you must've seen on Instagram that we color the milk' and my friend was super-excited by this. Of course she had!
Naturally, as soon as we sat down, she began taking photos of her bowl of cereal and posting them online. Then, spending the rest of the meeting checking her phone to see what people had said about it.

Seriously?

You know, I often get shocked stares when I tell people I'm 19. Someone even told me that I can't be, since I actually have stuff to talk about and I thought he was exaggerating. Surely, people my age can't be that bad, I thought.
But they are. They're so self-obsessed and dependent on other people's meaningless opinion. Believe me, these girls consider the day wasted if they haven't checked in to some fancy place and posted pics like the ones above.

Why?

You must be wondering. I know I am. Well, I guess it makes sense, given that they spend most of their time packed together, because of their proximity in age. And they have stuff like this constantly jammed down their throats. Since it's so hard to adapt at school, nobody wants to take the chance and be the odd one out, reading a book at breaktime, so everyone does the same thing.
I know, a good question is how they got here in the first place, but let's face it, it's not profitable to peddle books to young minds, is it?
God forbid, they might start having independent thoughts. And we wouldn't want that. Oh no, that just would not do.
Let's push fake smiles down their throats, instead. Let's fill their head with meaningless phrases and bubbly butts that they can twerk to show their value in society. Let's make them think it's cool to pout and make a duck-face, it really shows your beauty to the world. And let's make them all go to the same places and take the exact same pictures, so that their little friends see how cool they are.

Because how can their friends claim they're not cool? They have a picture at this stupid place, see, and it looks like the same stupid picture some minor Instagram celebrity posted only a few days ago.

Seriously, look at the above photos. Do you see a difference? 'Cause I don't.

The first one is some Instagram star, the second is the late Ursula K LeGuin....who do you think young people are likely to recognize?

And I'm sorry. I really wish I could blame it on the government, or on school. It would be easy to say 'well, yeah, the poor victims of brainwash'. Because yeah, there is a huge effort to brainwash young people. But it's not like that. That's just an easy lie. It's comfortable, because it makes them not responsible of their own stupidity.

But they are responsible.

We all are. You can pay to have buckets of sugar and other toxins pushed into your body, just so that you can post yet another selfie online, or you can go read a book.

The choice is yours. It has always been yours.

Insta-fame or brains, because it sure seems like you can't have both. And you know what the sad thing is? It seems like you don't want to have them, anyway.

Thank you for reading,

Images - Instagram