This is one of those messages I want to give to young people.
Life is work, kids. Life takes effort. No matter what you want out of life – even if all you want is to eat Doritos and play Xbox – there is going to be a certain amount of effort involved in gaining and maintaining that lifestyle.
Note that I am not saying that life is nothing but work. Far from it. What I am saying is that even the most fecklessly hedonistic lifestyle will involve some effort.
You will have to do things you don’t want to do. Get used to the idea. Even billionaires have to do things they don’t feel like doing sometimes.
Even if all they need to do is yell for their assistants to do stuff.
The key thing to remember is that effort is not the enemy. And a big part of growing up it realizing and accepting that.
When you’re a kid in school, they make you do stuff you don’t want to do all the time. So do your parents and other authority figures. And so life becomes divided into two modes : the doing stuff you don’t want to do mode, which sucks and you hate it, and then there’s when you’re home or it’s the weekend or it’s summer, when you can do what you want and it’s awesome and you love it.
In such a situation, it makes sense to try to minimize effort, because almost everything in life comes to you without effort or investment so trying to get away with doing as little as possible has no negative consequences.
Worst thing that can happen is you have a messy bedroom. And parents who are pissed off at you for not doing your chores.
So hating work and effort and doing things you don’t want to do makes sense when you are a kid. But when you are an adult, everything changes.
Even if you’re still living with your parents and your Mom is still taking care of the house, unless they are very well off, you are still not going to be able to get everything you want without working for it.
Take dating. Dating takes money. You’re not going to get very far with a lot of people if all you can do with them is take a nice walk in the park.
But even if you’re incel AF and are fine with a completely solo sex life, you are still going to want things that are not free.
Like video games, or a car, or your own place to live where you don’t have to follow your parents’ room, or just the dignity of being employed.
And for all those things, you will need to leave home and get a job. And that means, at long last, growing up.
You’re on your own now. You’re responsible for yourself and your own wellbeing. Whether your life sucks or rocks is now up to you.
Maybe you’ve decided that effort is never worth it and therefore if something takes effort it’s inherently not worth doing.
That’s your choice. But look around you at the world. Note that billions of human beings seem to think all kinds of things are worth the effort.
Like having a job, for one.
Is it possible that they are getting things from life that are not visible from the sidelines? Could it be that they know something you don’t and you can only learn what they know by doing what they do? Might it even be possible that life is way better than it seems?
Because here’s the thing : I’m not trying to convince you that toiling away is wonderful.
All I am saying is that you could be having a hell of a lot more fun.
But you have to invest effort in life to get there.
It’s like there’s a million dollar check with your name on it, but you have to work at McD’s for a year in order to get it.
It would seem worth it then, wouldn’t it?
More after the break.
All of the above
Unsurprisingly, I am more or less talking to myself in Part I.
Those are all things I wish I could send back in time to my younger, healthier self to maybe galvanize him (me) into getting his (my) life in gear.
It probably wouldn’t work, come to think of it. If I really wanted to tell my younger self something useful, I’d tell him not to let our parents take us out of UPEI.
That would have saved me the last 30 years of fucking depression.
I was thinking about that time period earlier today, and it occurred to me that even before their withdrew their financing, they acted like my brother and I were doing something wrong just by needing to go to college just like my sisters did before us and like we were promised our whole lives.
At the time, I didn’t think much of it because quite frankly I had been treated like an unwanted expense and made to feel guilty for existing for my whole life and so to me, that was perfectly normal.
But what occurred to me is that, looking back, we didn’t do anything wrong. They did. They fucked up by not saving up for the entirely predictable expense of sending me to college when I left high school.
And by not paying for my brother to go at all before then, which is one of many injustices my poor bro has suffered.
Male pattern baldness being another.
So yeah, my parents had tons of time to save up for mine and my brother’s inevitable college education but they just kind of forgot about my brother and me and then acted like it was our fault that we, ya know, needed things.
Fucking Boomers, am I right?
I mean, if they had deposited a dollar a day in the bank from the day I was born till my 18th birthday, they would have saved up $6570, which would have paid for four years tuition and a small bite of the other expenses.
Could have done the same for my brother Dave, too.
I am positive there were things we could done without to make that happen.
But no, somehow, they didn’t think that far ahead.
And that was apparently our fault somehow.
Really chaps your asshole, dunnit?
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.