By Teabag
Oh hello… you’re alive,
Great…Welcome to the world,
Have a seat… (because you can’t walk yet)
You’re going to spend the next few years in the psychedelic world of colors that make no sense but it’s all right.
Because you can pee yourself and someone will probably sort that out for you
(But don’t get used to it…
soon they’ll be expecting you to use the toilet so make the most of it).
And not long after that you have to go to a building where they’ll make you learn stuff and prove you know it.
Like time tables and the alphabet and whatnot.
Maybe you’ll still feel like the center on your world and you can probably get away with that for a while going to have to learn some humility.
Got it?
Good.
All right.
Then you’re going to go to another building soon where the tests are a bit harder and the subjects are more intense.
Molarity, calculus without ever actually explaining what you can use it for.
Don’t worry just memorize it and spit it out as soon as you step out of the exam hall
By now you’re probably getting weird urges to do stuff to your classmates you never really wanted to do before.
And now you’re gonna have to play a game of the rest of your life where you really want this kind of closeness with people but sometimes not everybody feels mutually,
So you’re going to have to hide it.
Welcome to the world of dating, body language and sex,
Yeah… you’re gonna like the last one.
It’s going to dictate your life and most of the films you watch and books you read to come whether you realise it or not.
Let’s get to university…
You’ll need to if you want to earn lots of money, which is obviously very important, because, well, it just is, shut up. Everyone’s happy when they’re rich.
Pick a subject.
No, not humanities you idiot, something real like law or maths.
I didn’t spend 18 years raising you to be a fucking philosophy major, cogito ergo broke all the time.
Oh, you finished. Great.
Well, it’s off to the companies for you then. Tell them you’re a people person, you have excellent organizational skills and you work well in a team. Don’t mention your actual passions like landscape gardening or music, they don’t give a shit. Just be as generic as possible, stick it out for about 30 years, you’ll make good money in time.
Only the sex thing is probably getting a little empty now and you’re craving some kind of actual connection with the opposite sex, or same sex, if that’s your thing.
Jesus, you thought getting people to take their clothes off was hard, you try finding a partner to fall in love with.
And even then, what if they get bored, or you get bored, or they go out with a milkman or something.
Well, sorry, you’re just going to have to risk it like everyone else. Like life actually, some people are dead by your age, but you’re not.
No, you’re still sat in a pit of your own mediocrity feeling dull and stepped on by life, standing on a rock that’s spinning at 9,000 miles an hour around a gas giant in an infinite universe, the product of 13 billion years of cosmic evolution, but no, no, definitely you carry on being bored, feeling like crap.
And now you feel worse because you know how great you should feel about everything, amazed and happy all the time, yet you still feel like shit.
Well, that’s biology.
Well, maybe your friends are getting rich, or getting married or pregnant or something, and you’re poor and single and maybe you don’t want kids. It doesn’t matter what Carl Sagan says, you don’t feel any sense of wonder at all. You feel like shit. You don’t want eloquent pro’s about how beautiful the cosmos is, you want money to live comfortably on.
You want to be in love, or maybe you want children. Try books, there’s quite a few dead guys who are willing to claim they can explain what you’re doing here and how you can be happy, but loads of them just contradict each other and to be honest, it all comes down to you.
You’re going to have to decide whether you believe in God, or want to eat meats, or support abortion, or feel that life has intrinsic meaning. And whatever you do, people will shit on your opinions and tell you you’re delusional.
Sorry. It’s a game with no winners.
And now you’re old and maybe you’ve got money or maybe you haven’t, same with a partner and child, and now you’re two steps from death. You spend a lot of time thinking about what you could have done,
How you should have said “I love you,” and instead you said “Look, I’m sorry, I’m just not in the best place right now. Come on, it’s getting cold.”
Well, now that you’re thinking about it now, Jennifers’ probably old and depressed just like you are, not much time left.
“Well, I guess I’ll just do it all again differently the next time.”
Oh, there isn’t a next time? Well, that was it? Shit, I wish I’d known.
Because if I’d known that this was the one chance I’d have to live as a talking monkey in space at the best point in history as the smartest species on the planet,
Using fucking magic on a daily basis like the Internet and jet planes and smartphones, with access to all human knowledge at my fingertips and the chance to talk about how cool being alive is,
I might have not worried so much about what other people thought and their shitty lives. And I might have just spent what little time there was making good art, or doing good science, or falling in love or just not being a dick.
Oh well. If only I’d known. Which I did. I just didn’t really want to think about it.
(From exurb1a: Oh Hello, You’re alive)