It’s Time to Make a Serious and Intentional Change to our Behavior

Anastasia finally made it happen.

She spent five long years saving enough money to buy the equipment, rent a space, and launch her own cell phone repair business. She hired a team—putting money back into the local economy—and even hosted workshops to help others learn how to do repairs on their own.

But she ran into a problem bigger than she expected.

As people bought new phones, and those phones eventually broke, they didn’t come to her. They replaced them. They threw the old ones away and upgraded to the newest model. Month after month, it became harder for Anastasia to keep her staff busy—despite her efforts to educate customers on the value of repair.

Then the rent was due. She couldn’t keep up.

Eventually, people weren’t interested in what she had to offer anymore.

This story gets told every day to countless entrepreneurs—and it almost always ends the same way:

1. a unique, sustainable business disappears, and

2. jobs disappear with it.

So where does the problem really live?

It lives in the fact that we, as consumers, have the power to choose what survives.

Do we really want to live in a society made up of bland, corporate offerings? Do we no longer value the personality behind the things we own? Have we become so addicted to convenience that we’ve started treating everything—including people’s livelihoods—as expendable?

It doesn’t have to be this way. And the uncomfortable truth is: you’re in control.

You decide who survives and who goes under. You decide what kind of economy you want to live in. You decide whether your ethics allow you to support your neighbors—or participate in their downfall.

In The Grapes of Wrath, the man demolishing the farmer’s house wasn’t some faceless enemy—he was the farmer’s neighbor. If you haven’t read that book in a while, I suggest you go back and give it another chance. It offers a powerful reminder of what happens when people surrender their choices to “the system.”

So what does this mean for us?

The facts are simple: we’ve dug ourselves into a deep hole. It’s going to take time to climb out of it—and even longer to wipe the cultural brainwashing off the windshield of our lives.

But we can change the future.

Join me in making one simple, consistent choice: only support family-owned and small businesses every single weekend. Make it a conscious behavioral shift. Put your money where it actually matters.

You want the beneficiaries, donors, and empires built on exploitation to lose power?

This is how we start.

We have to retrain ourselves to value creativity—not just in theory, but in practice. We all say we do, but then we settle for convenience.

Life is inconvenient.

And that inconvenience is part of what makes it beautiful.