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If you’re anything like me, you grew up thinking that being an adult would be the greatest thing life had to offer. Now that much of us have entered the world of “please advise,” and “Well, it looks like tomorrow is going to be sunny out,” you can bet your ass that you now have plenty of time to lament over the fact that being a kid was, well, just a hell of a whole lot better.
Now, I’m only in my mid-20s here, so like much of you in this age group, I can still pretend like I have no responsibilities, but let’s just stop and think for a second. Isn’t it funny how when you were a kid you always wished you were just a little bit older, and now that you’re older you constantly wish you were younger? If you think about this question long enough, you start to get a peculiar smell of bullshit. A smell that gradually gets more pungent with every email, every phone call, and every bill payment being clicked away with a mouse.
After joining the “real world,” you start to slowly see the trend as your proverbial Third Eye gets squeegeed. You sit idly at a desk for 45 hours a week, staring into the abyss of a computer screen, under fluorescent tubes that are melting your insides, and you finally start to understand what Peter Gibbons was talking about. Your daily routine can be done with your eyes closed, and the highlight of your day is getting that cup of coffee and taking it all in before the mad house begins. If you work in an office, you’ll see that literally everyone is a “manager,” whether it’s office manager, sales manager, project manager, coffee manager, or what-the-fuck-ever. Don’t be fooled by this, it’s just another way to make you feel established all while being diverted away from the fact that your pay sucks. You start to question what exactly other people do all day, especially HR people, and then you come to the realization that Human Resources are essentially the human traffickers of the corporate world, tricking people into a life of submission by offering a “competitive” salary and benefits package.
Once you’ve made it out of the maze alive at the end of the day, now comes the self medicating part. You know, that part of the day where you and Samuel Adams make schemes on how to get rich quick so you never have to go to work again. Is this a phase of growing pains? Probably, but after you listen to coworkers who are older than you and still doing the same scheming bullshit you do, it doesn’t seem like these pains are going to be grown out of any time soon.
Once you’ve tended to the 50 or 60 unread emails in your inbox in the morning, and you get politely yet passively aggressively dismantled in about 13 of them, another trend starts to emerge. It’s the trend where every married guy around you tells you not to get married and not to have kids, and every married woman around you tells you to marry a rich girl. Lucky for you, it’s time to go to the bathroom, which will be the first bathroom trip out of 17 for that given day. Always take your bathroom trips seriously no matter what your objective is. When you only get two weeks vacation a year, think of these bathroom trips as extra paid vacation time. The only difference is instead of sitting at a bar on Pacific Beach, you’re sitting on a toilet looking at people via Facebook that you graduated high school with who are now having kids. You get just a few seconds of free time before some asshole decides to grab the stall right next to you and ruin your mini-vacation.
Then comes the commute home. As if sitting down all day wasn’t degrading enough. This is a great time to reflect on the day’s events and realize that you essentially drove all this way to make someone else a whole lot of money. Watch out for that car over there because you can’t afford to get in an accident since your health coverage is bogus and you also wouldn’t be able to afford a car repair bill. When you finally get home, a feeling of immense joy over takes you and for a glimpse of a moment you feel like a kid again! Then you start to think about the fact that you have to do this all over again tomorrow and the day after that for 5 days a week, every week, for 35-45 years.
Hopefully someday you get the corner office, but the monotony will remain the same; it’ll just be under a different fluorescent light and you’ll get to stare out the window now, overlooking other windows with other people staring out of them and all of you are collectively wondering how the hell you got there and if any of this is real and so the perpetual bullshit cycle continues.
Respond
This is probably the most depressing thing I could’ve read while procrastinating at my desk this morning.
No words have ever been truer.
I’d rather work 16 hour days 6 days a week getting my own business off the ground than making money for some jackass who is probably on his boat in the Bahamas anyway.
“When you finally get home, a feeling of immense joy over takes you…”
until you realize that you have to make dinner for yourself using 5 unrelated items in your fridge like some kind of depressing top chef episode. Most of the items are expired.
Damn. So spot on.
Is your email password “drowssap”?
I get paid a fair salary, and I enjoy what I do on occasion. Eff me, right?
The truth is harsh. Had to be said though.
Had to throw in that 45 years line, didn’t you? I did not want to hear that today.