“You better grow up” sounds like “you better be miserable.” It sounds like “why are you not doing something that sucks right now.” Why aren’t you home with your kids, swabbing shit out of the crack of their ass with a woefully inadequate hand-e-wipe. Why aren’t you rich. Why don’t you have a mortgage. Why don’t you own your own home and if you do why aren’t you on the phone with the contractor right now improving it in a manner that will increase its value so you can flip it. Why didn’t you get your cholesterol tested. Why is your credit rating below eight hundred. Why don’t you have kids yet and if you do why aren’t they enrolled in the finest schools. Why don’t you have a complete cable and internet package with a million channels you will never have time to watch.

Your eggs are dying. Your kid will be a mutant. He’ll be born with no digestive tract and your life will be wheeling him around all day worried about finding a public rest room where you can empty his colostomy bag. Why aren’t you married. Why don’t you even have somebody you might marry. Why does that person not have an advanced degree in a lucrative STEM field. Why don’t you have an IRA– if you had begun investing when you were 22 you would have ten million dollars now due to logarithmic growth. But don’t spend it– you’re gonna need ten times that much by the time you retire. You will have cancer and Alzheimer’s and stroke and kidney failure and fifteen years worth of logarithmic growth will pay for one alcohol swab to swipe the crack of your ass. Nobody’s gonna help you when your arm is just veiny turkey skin flapping off shivering tendons– why can’t you take some god damn personal responsibility.

Fifty per cent of marriages end in divorce. Ninety per cent of children have ADHD or are on the autism spectrum or have restless leg syndrome. Every white collar job on the planet requires you to be maximally productive for eighty hours per week. Why don’t you work and work and work and come home and fight with someone you don’t love and spend money on the mutant freak you paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to create by having a piece of your balls and a piece of her womb stuck in liquid nitrogen until you were adequately rich. Why don’t you have a ninety thousand dollar car and a cellar stocked with three hundred dollar bottles of wine. Because my twelve hundred dollar piece of shit gets me to the liquor store where they got pinot noir for three bucks is why, and and if I don’t like the woman I’m with I can kick her out. Just like a company can kick me out. We are in a free market, for fuck’s sake.

Here’s the good news, they tell you: inflation has stopped. You can have a 48 inch TV for fifty bucks. There are more and better goods available to you know than ever in the history of humankind– unless you want to have a house. Unless you want to go to school. Unless you want to get treated if you get cancer. Unless you want to leave town on anything besides a homemade hang glider or the back of a donkey. Inflation has stopped for everything except fuel, housing, education, health care, and food– uh, what the fuck else is there? You think I’m buying a new TV every week? We are in an age where it’s easier to get anything except anything you might ever want. Porn and TV’s are easy to come by but love and knowledge and shelter and health are all impossible. It’s time you grow up, they tell you, and the way to do that is by writing us a nice big fucking check.