Get Rich! Just Like Me!

Facebook ads were strange and are just getting stranger.

Based on the pattern on this fellow's collar – which looks an awful lot like the military's new MARPAT camouflage pattern – I suspect this fellow is a member of the U.S. military holding up some Iraq or Afghanistan reconstruction money, not some entrepreneur showing off his hard-won earnings:


As our country spindles downwards into economic darkness, I feel like I've noticed a trend whereby the claims of internet advertising have become more ambitious and outlandish. As our lives get plainer, ads promise only more luxury.

Today, we're all suddenly focused on living within our means, we wonder how we'd manage if that job disappeared, we know that our current shared struggle was hatched from the simultaneous failure of our fellow countrymen's fatally flawed get-rich-quick schemes.

Yet we're still not attentive enough to notice that the image of the fellow holding tens of thousands of dollars in his hand is a ploy, a lie in plain sight. That money is not his and it's not yours, but maybe you're more likely to click the ad today than you were a year ago, because just for a second, you want to believe that you can succeed economically without wait or effort. Just for that moment, you look at the image without seeing, hoping for the chance to get rich because you're sick of a world that says you're lucky to get by.