Adulting is Stupid
Being an adult is dumb.
First off, I've become acutely aware that, since I'm currently searching very actively for a job, employers are venturing onto here and reading what I'm writing. That's made me remiss to be openly expressive on here, which defeats the entire purpose of this blog. This is one of the main reasons I stopped posting all the time. (The other reason being that whenever I go back and read something I've written, I start cringing at how awful it is. Seriously, why are you reading this shit, whoever you are?)
Screw all that. I don't really have anything to say that needs to be hidden. I curse more than I should, but whatever. I'll open this post with the standard qualifier that everyone else uses: all opinions expressed on here are entirely representative of those of my employer. So, if I offend you and you feel the urge to sue someone, sue them, not me. (Side note: I'm currently unemployed.)
So I've come across this notion that "being an adult is stupid" before. I believe I've seen it expressed as a meme on social media a few different ways. I've always dismissed it outright as a really dumb idea, because someone has to be the adult. What does this imply? That we should all just stop being grown-ups, shun all responsibility for all aspects of our lives, and just act like kids? Obviously, the world can't function like that. Even in less advanced societies, someone has to go out everyday and at least kill some animal that the tribe can eat.
And besides, it's not as though any of us really have a choice in the matter. There's not a career path you can choose that will let you be a kid forever. And even if there were, is anyone really enough of a sucker to choose that option? You have no power as a kid. Sure, it's this weird void of having to do anything hard in order to keep yourself fed and with a roof over your head...but someone else is telling you when to go to bed and to clean stuff.
I got to be an adult, and I went out that very day (I became an adult overnight I guess) and bought a giant bag of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, and I ate the whole damned bag, just like that. No one told me not to, and if they had, I would have just punched them in the nose and kept eating. The entire experience was magical. There's no way anyone's going to experience that and then voluntarily relinquish that freedom.
Of course, once you open that door, you start waiting for common sense to kick in. Like, a sense that maybe you shouldn't eat the whole bag because diabetes or something, but oddly, that common sense never arrives. Or usually the diabetes comes knocking on your door first.
But it's not that being an adult is stupid in comparison to being a kid. There's simple tradeoffs there. It's just that the adult world itself is so chock full of stupid things. It's totally true. I was skeptical, but I'm 34 years old now, which is to say that I'm not just parroting this point of view because I read it somewhere on the Internet. I've done my own real-world research. The fabric of the adult world is embroidered heavily with stupid.
When you meet a couple for the first time, one of the prototypical questions you can ask is how the two of them met each other. I asked this question for years, because I guess you're supposed to, but the answers were never really that interesting, and they don't deepen your understanding of the people you're talking to, which is the point of conversation. So I like to ask couples what kinds of things they fight about. Usually, as they're trying to answer that question, an argument breaks out between them. It's at this point, while they're distracted yelling at each other, that I slip away into the crowd.
Jobs make sense to me; you have to go out and do something of value for someone else who will give you money for it. It's the details that have me all tripped up here: where you live and work are, for the average American, 12 miles apart. (I didn't cite a source for that statistic because I just made it up.) So you need to own a car, feed it gasoline, register it with the state, buy insurance on it, get it towed when it breaks down, rotate its tires, change its oil, and I'm sick of listing car things now. You drive to work on roads with finite capacity at the exact same times of day as everyone else, the roads are always breaking down, and you can get fined by a police officer if you drive poorly. (Or shot if you're a black person, so I hear.)
What's wrong with any of this? "What do you propose, then, Jim?" I hear you asking. I'm not saying I've worked out a sensible alternative on a bar napkin or anything. I'm just saying that the system we have clearly wasn't designed up front with a lot of planning...it's just kind of happened, and here we are. It's not bad, but if you think it through, all of this is pretty dumb. It doesn't have to be this complicated.
Think of the tax laws. We should scrap that entire body of law, just throw all of it away, and just have some 12-year-old girl decide how it should be going forward. Then it would be simple, and it would all still work just fine. As soon as a grown-up steps in and says, "Wait, we need to set up some complicated rules about what the definition of a 'home office' is," then that grown-up should be taken out back and shot. Keep it simple!
I'll never understand marriage. We've all grown up in households with moms and dads, or one of the two, or some mixture of parental guardians. We've seen our friends' parents in action. By the time we're 18, haven't we all seen enough marriages and how they operate in the world to realize that they haven't worked out all of the problems yet? It was a nice idea someone had a long time ago; I'd guess it was a caterer who was looking to create a new avenue for business. And it's just like daylight savings time: society doesn't benefit in any way, the whole thing just pisses people off and they complain about it endlessly, but we all go along with it because, you know...it's what we do.
Really, I can complain about any arbitrary number of things, but I've really come to conclude that the adult world is dumb just because of all the adults I've met. I want to be clear: these people are not dumb, but when I encounter them in the world, they all seem chronically unhappy. They drift between stores buying things without any visible sign of a pulse. Couples seem to be listening to each other distantly. Customers hate the employees, and the employees hate the customers. Parents look constantly annoyed with their upbeat children. No one really seems to be enjoying any part of this process that we've all bought into without any questions at all. People are only happy between 8 and 9:30 AM on Christmas morning, because the kids are distracted by their toys, there's no work, no traffic, you can sit in the living room in your underwear, you can get drunk if you want, and you don't have to start cooking or deal with family until later.
Maybe I'm bitter. I've been single for about a year now. People are starting to tell me that I need to get back out there and meet someone. The scary thing is that I'm starting to believe them. To be honest, everything that's happened since I've become single has convinced me that dying alone would be wonderful. Or, at least measurably more wonderful than putting up with 40 years of whatever bullshit I see couples getting up to in public around me. That's my biggest, most deep-seated fear from my childhood: that fundamentally, I'm a worthwhile human being who is completely deserving of the profound love that goes along with being in a committed relationship.
I'll take the love, but please include a gift receipt, and if you would, buy it in a store where I can return it for a full cash refund and not just store credit.
First off, I've become acutely aware that, since I'm currently searching very actively for a job, employers are venturing onto here and reading what I'm writing. That's made me remiss to be openly expressive on here, which defeats the entire purpose of this blog. This is one of the main reasons I stopped posting all the time. (The other reason being that whenever I go back and read something I've written, I start cringing at how awful it is. Seriously, why are you reading this shit, whoever you are?)
Screw all that. I don't really have anything to say that needs to be hidden. I curse more than I should, but whatever. I'll open this post with the standard qualifier that everyone else uses: all opinions expressed on here are entirely representative of those of my employer. So, if I offend you and you feel the urge to sue someone, sue them, not me. (Side note: I'm currently unemployed.)
So I've come across this notion that "being an adult is stupid" before. I believe I've seen it expressed as a meme on social media a few different ways. I've always dismissed it outright as a really dumb idea, because someone has to be the adult. What does this imply? That we should all just stop being grown-ups, shun all responsibility for all aspects of our lives, and just act like kids? Obviously, the world can't function like that. Even in less advanced societies, someone has to go out everyday and at least kill some animal that the tribe can eat.
And besides, it's not as though any of us really have a choice in the matter. There's not a career path you can choose that will let you be a kid forever. And even if there were, is anyone really enough of a sucker to choose that option? You have no power as a kid. Sure, it's this weird void of having to do anything hard in order to keep yourself fed and with a roof over your head...but someone else is telling you when to go to bed and to clean stuff.
I got to be an adult, and I went out that very day (I became an adult overnight I guess) and bought a giant bag of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, and I ate the whole damned bag, just like that. No one told me not to, and if they had, I would have just punched them in the nose and kept eating. The entire experience was magical. There's no way anyone's going to experience that and then voluntarily relinquish that freedom.
Of course, once you open that door, you start waiting for common sense to kick in. Like, a sense that maybe you shouldn't eat the whole bag because diabetes or something, but oddly, that common sense never arrives. Or usually the diabetes comes knocking on your door first.
But it's not that being an adult is stupid in comparison to being a kid. There's simple tradeoffs there. It's just that the adult world itself is so chock full of stupid things. It's totally true. I was skeptical, but I'm 34 years old now, which is to say that I'm not just parroting this point of view because I read it somewhere on the Internet. I've done my own real-world research. The fabric of the adult world is embroidered heavily with stupid.
When you meet a couple for the first time, one of the prototypical questions you can ask is how the two of them met each other. I asked this question for years, because I guess you're supposed to, but the answers were never really that interesting, and they don't deepen your understanding of the people you're talking to, which is the point of conversation. So I like to ask couples what kinds of things they fight about. Usually, as they're trying to answer that question, an argument breaks out between them. It's at this point, while they're distracted yelling at each other, that I slip away into the crowd.
Jobs make sense to me; you have to go out and do something of value for someone else who will give you money for it. It's the details that have me all tripped up here: where you live and work are, for the average American, 12 miles apart. (I didn't cite a source for that statistic because I just made it up.) So you need to own a car, feed it gasoline, register it with the state, buy insurance on it, get it towed when it breaks down, rotate its tires, change its oil, and I'm sick of listing car things now. You drive to work on roads with finite capacity at the exact same times of day as everyone else, the roads are always breaking down, and you can get fined by a police officer if you drive poorly. (Or shot if you're a black person, so I hear.)
What's wrong with any of this? "What do you propose, then, Jim?" I hear you asking. I'm not saying I've worked out a sensible alternative on a bar napkin or anything. I'm just saying that the system we have clearly wasn't designed up front with a lot of planning...it's just kind of happened, and here we are. It's not bad, but if you think it through, all of this is pretty dumb. It doesn't have to be this complicated.
Think of the tax laws. We should scrap that entire body of law, just throw all of it away, and just have some 12-year-old girl decide how it should be going forward. Then it would be simple, and it would all still work just fine. As soon as a grown-up steps in and says, "Wait, we need to set up some complicated rules about what the definition of a 'home office' is," then that grown-up should be taken out back and shot. Keep it simple!
I'll never understand marriage. We've all grown up in households with moms and dads, or one of the two, or some mixture of parental guardians. We've seen our friends' parents in action. By the time we're 18, haven't we all seen enough marriages and how they operate in the world to realize that they haven't worked out all of the problems yet? It was a nice idea someone had a long time ago; I'd guess it was a caterer who was looking to create a new avenue for business. And it's just like daylight savings time: society doesn't benefit in any way, the whole thing just pisses people off and they complain about it endlessly, but we all go along with it because, you know...it's what we do.
Really, I can complain about any arbitrary number of things, but I've really come to conclude that the adult world is dumb just because of all the adults I've met. I want to be clear: these people are not dumb, but when I encounter them in the world, they all seem chronically unhappy. They drift between stores buying things without any visible sign of a pulse. Couples seem to be listening to each other distantly. Customers hate the employees, and the employees hate the customers. Parents look constantly annoyed with their upbeat children. No one really seems to be enjoying any part of this process that we've all bought into without any questions at all. People are only happy between 8 and 9:30 AM on Christmas morning, because the kids are distracted by their toys, there's no work, no traffic, you can sit in the living room in your underwear, you can get drunk if you want, and you don't have to start cooking or deal with family until later.
Maybe I'm bitter. I've been single for about a year now. People are starting to tell me that I need to get back out there and meet someone. The scary thing is that I'm starting to believe them. To be honest, everything that's happened since I've become single has convinced me that dying alone would be wonderful. Or, at least measurably more wonderful than putting up with 40 years of whatever bullshit I see couples getting up to in public around me. That's my biggest, most deep-seated fear from my childhood: that fundamentally, I'm a worthwhile human being who is completely deserving of the profound love that goes along with being in a committed relationship.
I'll take the love, but please include a gift receipt, and if you would, buy it in a store where I can return it for a full cash refund and not just store credit.