Teenage angst had always gotten the better of me, for both good and bad. I had always been a curious person, trying to push the boundaries of what my world was and what people wanted me to be. Sure, it got me in a lot of trouble but it left me with some stories to tell.
My earliest memories seemed mundane enough compared to what other people have described growing up. I do not recall being exceptionally gifted at anything and was not more of a precocious child than most. This all changed when my father brought home two things, a home computer and an AOL free trial compact disk.
At first, I didn't understand the point of it, after all my Nintendo could play games and I saw zero value in this thing called "Excel" but that quickly changed. Immediately after the soon to be banal phrase "You've got mail" rang through the speakers my curiosity was peaked.
What I discovered was unfathomable in my pre-adolescent mind. The entire world opened up to me and I could explore every thought, concept, and idea in detail at my own pace. The concept of communicating instantly with multiple people was especially a breakthrough. While I spoke over the phone before, it had always been to people I knew outside the digital realm. Now I could communicate with people from all walks of life at any point of time.
Needless to say, I was on the computer all the time. My parents were concerned at first until they started noticing changes in my school work and work ethic. So much so that my parents actually installed another phoneline for exclusive use of internet, it was the 90s after all. I quickly rose to the top of my class and things seemed to be going well in their minds, at least until puberty started.
At the age of 13 I began to become interested in girls with full force. While internet porn was available and I knew how to circumvent my parents' restrictions on the computer, my primary focus was girls my own age, girls I actually knew and could interact with. This led to near constant use of AIM and while my school work did not suffer, I started engaging in undesirable behavior like sneaking out at night and lying about where I would be going.
These teenage infractions eventually did cut into school though but not the quality of my work. I began to occasionally make plans with a sweet heart or two after those school bells rang to go off-site in more excluded areas, away from the prying eyes of adults. I simply got the assignments from my friends, filled it out, and continued with my business. A few days here and a few days there was no big deal but as I reached my senior year of high school the senioritis really set in. In the second semester, which had 90 days to it, I missed 45. I even made honor roll for both quarters but that mattered very little when the principal called my parents and I to inform me that due to my absences I would not graduate and had to be held back.
This was by far the worst moment I had yet to experience up to this of time. I had gotten accepted to a few top-notch schools but I was unable to defer my admission when the reason for my deferment was discovered. To make things worse, I was now on everyone's radar and could not galivant around like I had once done. My parents also were not at all too happy about having my future derailed over such a stupid situation. They gave me a list of things I would have to do to remain living with them and for them to continue supporting me through this and college. I had to work summer job and when school started again I had to join clubs to guaranteed that my hands were always busy.
Man, mowing lawns every day in the summer heat was brutal but it did give me surprising time to think. I had to think of any way to get out of the situation, or at the very least adapt the current situation to become more tolerable. This led me to the source of all my knowledge and cleverness, the internet.
We had, at this point, switched to broadband and a wide variety of options opened up to me but I wasn't quite sure how to best capitalize on it. I eventually found a better part time job selling CDs via catalogues. These were mostly "books on tapes", educational CDs, language learning CDs, and self-help CDs. While these were sold elsewhere, my commission derived from the money that the company would have spent on advertising.
Things were going better. I found a niche selling CDs, mostly to my neighbors and family friends, I was making slightly more money (but nothing absurd), and I got to enjoy a lot more of the A/C. Everything was pretty much the boring summer days until I decided one day out of the blue I read an article online. It was discussing the placebo effect on stop smoking CDs and how the whole thing was a waste. There was nothing unusual about this in itself but I had recently sold a set of CDs to my mother's friend/coworker, Karen, that was meant to help you control your cravings through relaxation therapy.
I also knew that Karen had been quite vocal about how she was able to stop smoking in a relatively small amount of time, and attributed her success to her daily listening of the CDs. My curiosity was piqued and I decided to investigate whether this was true or not.
After ordering the CDs myself I did what any self-respecting millennial with a computer would do, I ripped it onto my computer. I did listen to it but didn't really seem to be anything especially special. Upon further dissecting of the audio I found something rather odd. Embedded within the wavs was a track that I had not noticed before. After tinkering around with it I found that it was voice in the extremely low registers repeating itself throughout the entire CD saying, "You do not need to smoke, you feel great when you are not smoking and listening to this CD, you want to continue listening to this CD and not smoke". It just kept repeating itself over and over until the last track of the last CD where the voice repeatedly said, "to continue not smoking you need to buy the next CD".
I was baffled. I heard of hypnosis before but never really thought much about it. I looked over the other tracks on the CD and found that it was all created to set a person in a relaxed, suggestive state and then implant those suggestions. It became so obvious why Karen would have gone from smoking $20 dollars a week in cigarettes to spending $50 bi-weekly on these CDs. I looked into some of the other CDs I sold and found similar messages hidden away. At first, I wasn't entirely sure what to do with this knowledge but a light bulb clicked on and I knew. If all these CDs were doing was implanting ideas into the person's head, why don't I cut out the middle man, make the CDs, and sell them myself.