Some of the fondest memories of my life are of my father. When I was two years old, like many other kids in the eighties, my parents divorced. Though my father fought valiantly for custody, the late-eighties were a different era, when courts almost unquestionably passed custody to mothers in most cases. That’s still the case, but we’ve seen a drastic decline in mothers with sole custody and a corresponding rise in parents with joint custody. Often, courts won’t let a parent take a child out of state when custody is shared. My mother wanted to move from California to Florida, which, in a rather unusual move, the courts allowed.

An agreement was struck— I’d stay with my mother in Florida during the school year and with my father during out-of-school breaks. Until my teenage years, every summer and every winter, I would visit my father in Ohio, where he’d gone from California to rebuild his life after my parents’ fierce divorce. He’d sunk his savings into the grueling court battle.

I remember the feeling of the sunshine and the wide-open skies during the long car rides when he’d come to pick me up from Florida and drive me all the way to Ohio — a 947-mile trek, 1,524 kilometers. It felt like the world was at our fingertips, like my dad and I could do absolutely anything we put our minds to. It was also a nice break from my mother’s house which, in adulthood, one of my childhood friends would later describe as “anarchy.”

Alcohol flowed late into the night as loud music pounded through the speakers. Loud party guests showed up at all hours. Fights—often alcohol induced—broke out. Televisions blared constantly, the only semblance of “normal,” I experienced, except those intermittent voyages with my father.

Corporate Sponsored Rebellion

My parents couldn’t have been more opposite in their approaches to parenting. My dad wasn’t strict or stern, but loving, compassionate, forward-thinking, and provided structure; my mom provided nothing of the sort, just a massive, confusing party that would regularly descend into screaming chaos, one that proved understandably difficult to navigate as an eight-year-old child. Today, many people remember the unfettered 1980s and 1990s freedom fondly. But it was profoundly deleterious in many ways, especially for children trying to navigate a world so bizarre.

In those two decades, consumerism unofficially became more than just a way of life in Anglo-America — it became our chief cultural value. Money-hungry corporations itching to get their hands on young, impressionable minds like mine were thrilled that so many parents uncritically allowed them to invade our homes and advertise to their children. We were coming out of the Reagan-Thatcher eighties and everyone was high on the Reaganomics that, like a potent cocktail of narcotics, offered short-term pleasurable gains at the cost of long-term pain.

Trust for multinational corporations, many of whom, in hindsight, never had our best interests at heart, was at an all-time high. We still revere corporate accomplishments from this era, like the Ancient Greeks and Romans revered Hercules and Achilles for centuries. Corporate brands and their stories are the modern American mythology, the bedtime stories our televisions and laptops and smartphones tell our kids.

On one of those cross-country trips, when I was about ten years old, my father and I were having a heart-to-heart talk. Somehow, we got onto the subject of the meaning of life when I piped up, “Be young, have fun, drink Pepsi,” the current corporate motto for Pepsi soft drinks. It was plastered all over their ads, spoken at the end of their commercials. He was displeased. Looking back on that moment as an adult, I can see why.

Seeing him get worked up over it, and being the curious kid I was, I spouted off several more corporate slogans to his dismay. “What in the world is advertising doing to my kid?” he must’ve wondered.

I was a defenseless child with a mind incapable of grasping the near-omnipotent power of corporate forces rallied in secret to imbue my mind with fresh-baked branding messages. In the years since, we’ve come to learn just how much corporations were pumping kids’ minds full of noise.

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