If you think about your student loans in the usual manner – “crushing”, “demoralizing”, a “financial tragedy of grotesque proportions” – you would be correct, but that line of thinking will kill you.

Instead, try picturing your debt as an amiable but hungry ghost, rooting around in your refrigerator at night, using up the milk and cereal, falling asleep on your couch with an empty pint of ice cream clutched in its incorporeal fingers. Since I began thinking of my debt as a chubby, spectral sidekick my mood has improved immeasurably. I can’t recommend it enough.

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About 45 million Americans have student debt – one in three adults under 30, according to Pew. The typical debt, according to data from the Federal Reserve, is between $20,000 and $25,000.

I have always strived to be above average, however, and it gives me considerable pride to report that I owe more than $95,000. (The exact number changes frequently – usually upward; as of publication it is $96,215.12.)

Less than a fifth of my debt is from my undergraduate degree, in part because I chose to attend a university in Canada. I had to pay international tuition fees, but school was still cheaper than at comparable US universities.

My parents paid most of my undergraduate tuition and living expenses, for which I’m grateful. I offset my expenses with various summer jobs and side gigs – night watchman, janitor, telemarketer, fry cook, bar-back, paid psychological test subject – and by the time-honored tradition of buying a textbook, speed-reading the important parts and returning it while the receipt was still warm.

It became easier to worry about the money later and just treat my loans as a credit card with better rates

In my last year of school I took my first loan, less than $15,000, because my parents were starting to get tapped out. I probably would have paid off my undergraduate debt fairly easily – if I hadn’t gone on to get a master’s degree.

In 2016, exhausted after several years working in public relations and concerned that my aspiration to be the next Truman Capote kept getting deferred, I answered the siren call of graduate journalism school.

Journalism school is a strange institution – “the only master’s degree you do to make less money”, as someone once put it to me. The media industry has been in economic decline for much of living memory; journalism students are like Polish cavalry officers with horses and sabers, riding bravely into a hail of German machine gunfire. For this privilege they pay $10,000 to $20,000 a semester (or $30,000 at Columbia), not including living expenses.

I don’t regret it. The program was excellent and it undoubtedly made me a better writer and reporter. A scholarship covered a good chunk of the tuition, but I was living in New York, one of the most expensive places in the US, and attending NYU, one of the most expensive universities in America. Fees and bills accumulated at an alarming rate.

When I started grad school I set myself limits – “I will only take a certain amount in loans and force myself to make that number work” – that were, frankly, unrealistic. I soon exhausted my initial loans, so I took another one – a little one, just a stopgap – that quickly became another stopgap and another.

After a while, it became easier to worry about the money later and just treat my loans as a credit card with better rates.

After you finish a graduate degree, there’s a “grace period” before you have to start paying your debt, but interest is already compounding, which somewhat defeats the point. I wanted to get a running start, so I paid about $3,500 before the grace period ended. I felt good.

Within a few months the balance was the same as when I started. Soon I felt like Sisyphus, wheeling the rock uphill everyday for it to roll back down every night.

For a while I would lie in bed every night and see, emblazoned in the ceiling, the number $95,000. The anxiety made sleep impossible. Instead of counting sheep I would calculate $95,000 in, say, boxes of mac and cheese (76,000 of Kraft; 146,000 off-brand), or canned tuna, or Porsches. (This is an excellent exercise in Marxist class consciousness.)

Debt anxiety infected everything. I began to resent social invitations, which invariably involve spending money, and retreated into a self-imposed hermitage. In retrospect I don’t think this is a healthy attitude – if I were struck down tomorrow I wouldn’t necessarily want my last accomplishment to be “skipped his best friend’s birthday party to save on the subway fare” – but it is true that keeping up appearances puts a strain on the average millennial.

Instead of counting sheep I would calculate $95,000 in, say, boxes of mac and cheese, or canned tuna, or Porsches

At one point I auditioned for Paid Off, a gameshow that pays contestants’ student debt if they answer quiz questions correctly. If I had gotten on the show I probably could have wiped out my entire debt in one go – the questions are easy and the host is openly rooting for the contestants to win. I wasn’t selected, though. Reality show auditions require bubbly personalities and I generally struggle to emote.

I have public, federal loans - a good thing, in the sense that federal loans charge lower interest than private ones and the feds are easier to work with if you’re having trouble. I’m currently on a repayment plan tied to income; I’m only required to pay $160 or so a month.

On months I’m doing well I pay more, though I sometimes wonder if there’s a point. Given a choice between adding $500 to my emergency savings or dropping it into a potentially bottomless pit, I choose the first. I have the rest of my time on Earth to pay my debt but only 30 days to pay rent.

A friend of mine is an economist who studies student debt. According to his research, people with more debt actually tend to do better paying it off. Someone with $80,000 in debt from a prestigious university has high earning potential; the real victim, he argues, is the person who got $15,000 into debt at a predatory for-profit college, didn’t finish and is now struggling to make their payments while working at McDonald’s. This is probably true, though not much comfort to a schlemiel with almost six figures.

And so I have learned to think of my debt fondly. I believe in tying oneself to a course of action, and having the GDP of a European microstate in student debt is a great way to do that. Now I have to succeed as a writer; failure isn’t an option.

I don’t live as frugally as I could, in part because I’m too busy. I’m a freelance journalist – a gun for hire – and at any given time I’m reporting or writing two to three stories and working on pitches for a dozen others. I view time and money as a tradeoff. I don’t want to be penny rich and pound foolish. I order takeout sometimes. I take taxis if the occasion calls. I get my shoes repaired within five days of a hole appearing.

These days I don’t think about my debt as much as you might expect – I simply don’t have time. Of course, more than once in my life I have wanted to grab some miserly editor by the lapels and scream: “I’ve got cats to feed, goddammit!” But that would be bad for the editorial relationship. I can’t afford a cat, anyway.