The following story first appeared in City Arts.

When I was five, I called into an NPR show to complain that I couldn’t enjoy The Little Mermaid because it was sexist. When George W. Bush was elected to his second term the day I turned 18, I baited an unsympathetic community college English professor into a screaming match and was asked to take a walk. Throughout my 20s, I thought if I didn’t allow myself to be crushed by the headlines, I was living like a brat. I thought compassion meant I should only allow myself to be as happy as my most miserable friend.

But I’ve never been sullen. Most days I’m ablaze. I lean into love. I sit around my kitchen table with hooligans and sages and we smoke cigarettes until it’s light outside. I live hard in the darkness and I live hard in the light.

In other words, I really, really give a fuck, which is why I’ve decided to become a therapist. I’m genuinely interested in every aspect of the human experience, and as of now, the job of providing therapy cannot be outsourced to developing nations or robots. Plus it’s safe to assume that the demand for psychological help will increase proportionately with our collective despair.

This summer I volunteered to undergo a battery of psychological assessments that would interpret my personality. The kicker was the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory II, a 567-question true-or-false questionnaire that assesses an individual’s level of self-awareness, worry, despair, sociability and propensity for anger, obsessiveness, mania, over-sensitivity, hopelessness and fear. The questions ranged from baffling (“I think I might like to be a florist”) to existential (“I wish I could be as happy as others seem to be”). I did my best to breeze through on my gut reactions, but my answers kept bumping up against each other.

I brood a great deal: True.

I am not easily upset: True.

These conflicting answers made perfect sense to me, but I suspect they implied I either wasn’t paying attention or was falsely reporting. I asked my test administrator, had the MMPI-II been recalibrated since it was normed on Minnesotan farmers in the early ’90s, now that having a bleak attitude and being addicted to fun are no longer mutually exclusive?

My test score came back valid, he explained, indicating that I am a real person. The ability to feel hopeless while having a blast might suggest a high score on the Psychopathic Deviance scale, which is believed to measure an individual’s propensity for amorality, rejection of authority, impulsiveness and desire for instant gratification.

The good news: “Your score might simply reflect a psychopathic level of apathy,” he said. Hmm, I thought. Psychopathic apathy. I felt nothing and laughed. “Psychopathic apathy” is not a clinical term, but it strikes me as a reasonable strategy for living past the tipping point without losing your grip.

Today young people have access to more predictive knowledge than any previous generation—and the forecast is grim. But wait—according to baby boomers frantic to placate my generation into giving them grandchildren, the forecast has always been grim. Okay, dads. I understand the Cuban missile crisis was spooky. I see why the color-coded “Nuclear Annihilation” chart in your fifth-grade classroom almost made you piss your pants and I award you one point for illustrating the historically relative nature of doomsday handwringing. You can officially relate to being young and feeling like things are not going to be okay. But ultimately, times were simpler then. Now we’re fucked in so many different ways that isolating the most imminent or inevitable end seems impossible.

The Earth is simultaneously melting and burning. The state-sanctioned war on black America is now live-streaming on network news. Donald Trump is serious.

The future is too uncertain to make serious plans: True.

If I could live life over, I would not change much: True.

This is going to art school and defaulting on loans. This is living like you aren’t sure you’ll have a body in 30 years. This is why my friends are covered in joke tattoos. This is why I feel like music and love are all that matters, and why I’ve set up my life to revolve around these things instead of a future I can’t see.

I’m not living this way because I don’t care. I care so much that the world has busted my gauge and I refuse to put my happiness on layaway. This isn’t Generation X listlessness. I’m not nodding out, I'm living fearlessly and it’s intentional. Dance like no one is watching and swipe right like you've never been date raped. Smash and grab. Get free.

People often disappoint me: True.

I have been disappointed in love: False.

I have never felt better than I do now: True.

I am sometimes afraid of losing my mind: True.

If the future calls my bluff and I’m too feral for anyone to save me a seat on the geriatric spacepod, I will take comfort in the fact that the end of the world is a great thing to be wrong about, and I had a ball being wrong.