Sometimes it’s hard to get through your twenties when you know there’s at least another 30 years of mediocrity ahead of you. You want to stay positive and motivated, and you want to keep telling yourself that someday you’ll be great, but you know it’s not true, and it’s hard to put on a happy face and continue to play grown up while you balance your comforting delusions with the stark disappointment of reality. You wake up and go to work, feeling less and less like a child, while you do your best to ignore your inevitably anticlimactic and inconsequential death. You’re experiencing your twenties, and that’s special.

But you’re garbage. You’re not particularly talented and everyone you know has lied to you about your worth. So how do you keep being a care-free piece of shit millennial without killing yourself? Well, just take a look at these inspiring quotes from old people who are just as disposable as you:

Chuck Hansen, 55, Collects Disability:

“I spent my twenties trying to work my way up to a management position at the local movie theater, but then I got a hernia reloading the syrup bags on the soda machine and they never promoted me because I filed a worker’s compensation claim. I stayed at the movie theater for another 15 years anyways until I was edged out by a 17-year-old assistant manager that wanted to hire his friends. I’m in my late fifties now and I build model airplanes and I have skin cancer. Cubs are looking good this year though.”

Rebecca Smith, 47, Paralegal:

“The other day, during conversation, I found myself jealous of a woman who had been divorced three times. I have never been divorced. I have never been married. I tell myself it’s because I’ve dedicated myself to my career, but I just answer phones at a firm that practices family law. Every day I watch women with failed marriages in their darkest moments and I even then I know that they’re happier than me. I answer the phones the same way so often that when my father called me at home to tell me my mother had died I picked up and instinctually said, “Thank you for calling Epstein & Marigold, please hold.” I didn’t take time off work to go visit her in the hospital. The last time I saw her she told me my sister was her favorite. But there’s some good stuff on Netflix these days. ”

Jimmy Cosgrove, 38, Stay At Home Son:

“I spent seven years in community college. I would work a bit here and there but I never really saved any money beyond what I needed to attend a couple of annual music festivals. I did too much acid at a concert once and freaked out. I took off all my clothes and a group of guys beat me up and pissed in my mouth. I tried to play it off like it was a funny drug story but I still think about it every night before I go to bed. I think that’s the reason I didn’t finish community college and it’s definitely why I developed agoraphobia and never left my mom’s place. It was hard at first but now that I’m in my late 30s it feels like I’m mom’s caretaker and it’s kind of like having a job. Super stoked about the JJ Abram’s “Star Wars”. Really hope he doesn’t fuck it up.”

Frank Wilson, 42, Dishwasher:

“Growing up I wanted to be a professional wrestler. I didn’t find out wrestling was fake until I was 27 years old, and at that point it was already too late to lose my virginity. Emotionally speaking, I had invested everything in wrestling, and financially speaking, you could say the same. Finding out wrestling was fake was like finding out Santa wasn’t real, which I had also just discovered a year prior. That was also the year that I found out my dad wasn’t really an astronaut that had died in space, and I also learned that the gifted and talented school I had attended as a kid was actually an alternative program for children with emotional disabilities. Things turned around though. I wash dishes at Chili’s now and I hide my phone in the women’s bathroom. It’s like dating but I don’t have to confront my social anxiety.”

Jenny Firch, 41, Girlfriend:

“I always thought I’d be a writer. No, I knew I’d be a writer. I could feel it. I’d read every book I could get my hands on, and I was always making sure that everyone saw how much of a little reader I was. At family events, everyone would take notice. ‘Look at little Jenny! That girl’s going to be smart as a whip, reading all those books,’ they’d say, and I’d smile and think about how great I was as I scanned the pages without really comprehending anything. It was only years later that I realized not only was I not any kind of writer, I wasn’t even a reader. I had been illiterate the entire time. I was so busy thinking about how great I looked reading those books that I never bothered learning the English language. But you know what they say; fake it until you make it! I never became a writer, and I never learned how to read, but I did learn how to use my illiteracy to curry favor with co-dependent men who support me financially and emotionally as I navigate the wonders of my undiagnosed bipolarity.”