SelfAbsorbed.ME : ‘It’s Your Life, We Just Write it Funnier’

Good morning. If you’re reading this, most likely, you’re what our society would define as an ‘adult.’ A shocking thought, I know. Someone over twenty-one. At a desk. With a job. Well, today, I’m wishing I had known earlier in life exactly what being an adult defined.

When I was in child, in high school and heck, even in college, I harbored notions of growing up to live this fabulous responsible life filled with things like remote garage door openers, candle sticks and custom-made curtains. Oh, I wish I’d known what adulthood really was, a simple rotation of acting, stress, and stress relief, most likely in a crappy apartment.

Instead of growing up to do the important things we imagined, most of us end up trapped behind desks in the bizarre reality of “now you’re a rat in a cubicle-like cage for 40 hours a week pretending you like your superiors, pretending you like what you do, and pretending that your company’s mission is worthwhile.” Obviously, if you were running things at your company, you’d do everything differently. Most of the places we work have a structure or way of doing things so flawed in our eyes that we want to slowly bang our heads against our desk for consecutive hours – except that might look bad – remember key number one of being an adult is acting the part.

Naturally, the corporate lifestyle (who invented it, first of all? They’re insane) begins to stress you out just because there’s nothing natural about sitting in front of a computer screen 8+ hours a day. People in state jails have more freedom than us during the workday. They’re at least allowed to walk around, work out and play basketball. So then you seek stress relief through relationships with other ‘adult’ humans or by getting as drunk as possible (or both). I see adult people on the streets of New York drunker then any fourteen-year-old experiencing SoCos and lime for the first time on a regular basis. Most of us behave far worse now than we ever did as children. There’s no curfew now and no chance of your TV privileges being taken away. So really, the only schooling I ever needed out of my super expensive education was

a) Acting, and
b) How to cure a hangover

I always knew Geometry and American History would serve no purpose. Yet when I stated this fact simply to my parents as a teen, no one would listen to me.

In summation, it’s come to my attention that no one actually grows up. This adulthood of responsibility and bliss I was envisioning is really just a shit show of you flying solo in corporate BS while trying to be as irresponsible as possible on the side. On the downside, you pay your own bills. On the upside, if you’re single, you literally answer to no one and the world’s your playground. It’s sort of like that T.I. song, “You can have whatever you like.” You can! And this is great. I’m just wishing someone had tapped me on the shoulder when I thought scoring a 78 instead of an 88 in Algebra II classified me as worthless and painted the true adult picture for me. Then I could’ve taken my youth a lot less seriously.