Ownership- An Argument Essay

            The experience of being a human being is, lets face it, determined by the façades we put on: the cars we drive, the clothes we wear, the relationships we have and we don’t have. The idea of owning these things has become a disease in our culture. The more we have, the more we want. The more we want, the more we lose sight of ourselves and allow the material things and the status in life to dominate the experience of life. Ownership devalues, as humans, our sense of self and warps the value and meaning of our lives. The falsity of the entitlement we all feel is rooted in ownership and the greed and immorality it creates.

            This cycle of owning and wanting more, leading to immorality and the desensitizing of what is valuable is especially prevalent in one of my own cultures- youth. In the school environment, it is thought that we as individual students earn and own our grades. In reality, our cleverness is what really owns our merits, not our own selves. The A, leading to the GPA, leading to the ivy league has become what defines our self worth, trumping over the honesty of an earned and unassisted-by-the-writing-on-your-arm grade. The college(s) you are accepted into have become what defines, as young adults, our self worth; therefore devaluing the ownership of our own deserved and earned intelligence. Cheating has become the social norm among many, as seen through the faces in laps and the insides of desks glowing with the heavenly luminous cell phones during tests. The falsity of what now appears on report cards is an ownership that embodies the corruption that is human nature.

Wanting higher grades at any cost, even a falsified one, is just how ownership leads to greed and the inflation of our sense of self.

            The tangible grade is also serves as an example of the intangible status we own. Although not all strive to be the best and the brightest, or the wealthiest and the most indulgent, everyone strives to own some sort of status, whether it be falsified or not. The extent to which one will go to own this status is what defines their sense of self, and as it turns out, this extent is quite an extent. Tumblr (a popular “blogging” site with a young demographic), boasts “depression” blogs- blogs that feature enigmatic photos of fog and rain and drug use, something that has become glamorized by John Green books and small production movies where the girl is fallen in love with because of her sadness and is wanted for her brokenness. This idea that sadness and pain is romantic and dreamy is now a status people want to own, which is an obvious way in how we devalue our sense of self with ownership of the intangible.

            Ownership is something that is inevitable; we own ourselves, our decisions, our morals and values, and also our desires as a result of the things we own. We strive to be better than we are (sometimes decided upon by social trends in the example of “depression blogs”) as a result of ownership, which can, in turn, function to work against us by devaluing our sense of self.