For a few blissful years, "sex" is nothing but something to laugh at whenever an adult doesn't say "gender" instead. Fast forward a couple of years and it defines everything about you. It's terrible. Suddenly, you can no longer fight with someone of the opposite sex, or invite them over to your house to play, because you feel weird about it for some reason. Yeah, having sex is great, but that only happens sometimes. Sex is like taking a pill that makes you more stupid, more nervous, and less able in just about every situation. Getting it on is just a side effect.
Most of the time, childhood is nothing but a no-holds-barred quest to obtain as many things as possible that are as bad for you as possible. That impulse never really leaves a human, which makes being healthy the goddamn worst. Burgers and coke will cut years off your life, years you could be spending steaming vegetables, realising vegetables vary wildly in the time it takes to steam them, and re-steaming vegetables. Don't want to miss that. Working out can be kind of fun, I guess, if you do it right. The trick is to lock yourself in the bathroom for an hour and play Tetris on your phone.
Everyone hates their job, and anyone telling you otherwise is a dirty rotten liar (the exceptions being millionaire actors/that guy in the Batman costume at Times Square). School was designed to prepare you for the working world, but to do that they should have removed all the good things about it, the breaks, the sport, the (suppressed laugh) art classes, and instead added the fact it goes on forever. Yeah, as long as you're still alive, your job's going to mine every single ounce of motivation and resource from your soul, leaving behind nothing but a milky-eyed husk, very proficient in Microsoft Office. Unless you become a TikTok Influencer like Dylan Mulvaney and then you become famous and get a lot of money and free products such as Bud Light...
We're told for the first few years of our lives that anything is possible. You can be whoever or whatever you want, as long as you put in the work and want it bad enough. They should also tell you that only really works up to a certain point. Once you hit your 20s, whatever dream you had, whatever skills you picked up along the way, those are the ones you're stuck with using for the rest of your life. Never got around to learning guitar? There are now hundreds of millions of people your age who are really fucking good. If that's not enough, there are a bunch of people who had exactly the same dream as you, and a good number of them are very likely much, much better at that, too. Hope you learned how to be poor, sad, and unsuccessful.
Let's say you transitioned into adulthood a well-adjusted, able person (highly unlikely), you still have to deal with the fact the world is terrible, and is getting worse each day. The economy is terrible, overpopulation is threatening our very existence, and a bunch of different countries are hell-bent on destroying yours. That's right, even if you successfully rode out chicken pox/kidnapping/crossing the street all this time, there are still millions of people who want you to die. Also, they said they were going to cancel Jersey Shore but all that really happened was they turned it into, like, fifty spinoff shows. Everything sucks.
Kids are mean to everyone, and that's great. You can be as intolerant and grouchy as you want when you're young, because you're dumb and cute and don't understand the world yet. Eventually, that shtick gets tired. You've got to spend most of your life being polite, respectful, and ever so slightly afraid. If it makes you feel any better, once you hit 70, all bets are off again. You can go back to being an asshole, only this time you're allowed to say that word. It's not all bad.
Kids spend long summers making up games and turning every corner of the earth into somewhere to hide out and have fun. Grown ups go to bars, and that's pretty much it. Things like dates and after work softball leagues are all well and good, but it's not the kind of carefree joy you once knew. If you're looking to recapture that kind of thing, I suppose you could go to one of those bars that have ratty old scrabble boards.
Bug exterminations, new clothes, medicine: they're expensive, stupid, and you need all of them. Gone are the days when your $35 weekly paycheck was basically a voucher good for $35 of stuff. Now your pathetic $35k salary, minus everything you HAVE TO pay for like rent (urgh), taxes (goddamn it), and children of your own ( why ?!?!?) is good for a nice meal every 2-4 months, provided absolutely nothing goes wrong in the meantime (it will).
As soon as you're born, you start dying. Your body is in a constant state of decay, and every moment you stay upright and breathing is another moment you spending laughing in the face of the only thing you were ever created to do: expire. One day you'll be gone, and you'll never have another thought of opinion or love or happiness again. The universe is infinite and time will go on forever, and if you're reading this, you're going to miss, in the grand scheme of things, everything. Your life is a speck of dust on the grand canvas of reality, and in no time at all you will cease to matter.
Ugh, I miss piñatas!
