What is it with all the 20-something drones?

[Payne]

I moseyed along my early twenties in employment but doing nothing actually worthwhile (supermarket monkey slave, then call centre for HSBC).

Then the world fell on my head, and I indulged in a several year slump in productivity and usefulness.

During this slump I did do a bit of rewiring of my brain thoug, I think, for now that I have entered the world I'm doing it awesome style. My pay may be kinda shit, but that is actually unimportant - I'm learning useful shit and getting some sweet assed resume gold here. The boss has effectively put me in charge of £200,000 worth of stock (a part of the company which effectively makes up about a fifth of our income), and while it's slightly more work for pretty much the same pay it's something I can translate into Moar Bettarer in the future if I apply clevernes.

I have only taken a few days off sick since I re-started work, and I was genuinely ill. I cycle to work every day and as my work is quite physical labour intensive, I've lost a SHIT TON of weight.

I can actually come back from work and have a weird kind of buzz: I'm not happy about having to go out to work every day, but seeing as I have to then I do my part well enough, get paid and leave pretty much all the extraneous bullshit that inevitably rises from working at the door. And hell, because my work is usually mundane due to early application of cleverness I can listen to audio uni lectures on my headphones as I paint, repair and monitor use of all of our skips and containers. In the last few months I have learnt more about: astronomy, quantum physics, Shakespeare, The Crusades, the History of The United States, the history of the English language, the great "World Religions", ideas in philosophy, mythology of the  Greeks, Romans and ancient Middle East and a unch of literature including The Iliad, The Oddyssey, Dante's Divine Comedy and a whole bunch of lesser works, and a whole fuckton f other courses I haven't listed.

At some point soon I want to look into getting myself onto a respectable home learning coure on History (aiming towards a degree), sort out a driving license (which my boss has offered to pay for) and continue finding new ways to treat Pixie as a proper real princess.

Life, in short, is fucking spctaculawlsome now.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

You, Payne Our Lord, are AWESOME.

[Faust]

Until I hit 25 I was in a dead end retail job and very unhappy with where I was and what I was doing. Then within the space of a few months I got a research masters offer, and also started as an engineer for an embedded networks place.

[Cain]

Of course, I have managed to do both.

"Everything in moderation.  Except hookers and blow" - Aristotle

[LMNO]

I was just thinking about the little giggle I had at seeing Von Melee and Mayhem pushing a shopping cart down the road on Tuesday, and it occurred to me that almost every 20-something I know IRL is just treading water, at best.

They never finish a Goddamn thing, they don't work unless they absolutely have to, and then the height of their ambition is a Goddamn call center, and they spend almost all of their waking hours playing mindless video games...Not even GOOD ones, but OCD shit like Wii Bowling (how pathetic is THAT), golf (a simulation of a game that's almost a sport), and puzzle-style games that consist entirely of brightly colored blocks and lots of annoying sounds.

Now, I know the economy is tough out there, I understand that jobs are thin on the ground, but...FUCK, most of these people aren't even trying.  Please note that this is anecdotal, of course, and based entirely on Tucson and Hamilton, Ontario...But still, WTF? 

Go forward half a generation, and you've got people who DO things.  LMNO, for example, works a full time job, has a steady home life, and makes music on the side.  Nigel runs her own business...Times ARE tough, and she's apparently having a hell of a time, but she's hanging on. 

By contrast, my cousin's 22 year old son is "taking a year off of college" - translation:  He flunked out - and is living at his dad's house.  No job, no ambition, nothing but Goddamn video games.

The only reason I give a shit is that these will be the "prime producers" when I'm retired, which means I'll starve to death in the cold along with them.

And there's always a fucking excuse.  With Mayhem, it was "mental illness" (translation:  She is a drone, and is too fucking lazy to shift her fat ass).  With Marcus, it was just out-and-out laziness.  Fucker has the mind of a 4 year old.  Many of the rest cite the economy, to which I respond by pointing at Nigel.  The majority, horrible as it seems, think this is how life is meant to be.

Christallfuckingmighty.  7 billion humans on the planet, and all anyone knows how to do is have more humans and sit on the fucking couch.

Words cannot express how much I hate you all.

Or Kill Me

As I was settling into my second Negroni, I started thinking about this, and something struck me: This may be the result of allowing Disney to reinterpret the American Dream.

Simply put, they focus on the happy ending: "...you can be whoever you want to be".  The myth is ingrained into almost everything.  But they forget the first part, "If you work hard enough..."  

So kids just sit around like Michael Oher in The Blind Side, waiting for Sandra Bullock to give them a house and a scholaship and a football career*.  And you know what?  It's an easy myth to believe, because you can see it all around you, if you carefully excise the painful bits.  I gotta be honest, I fucked around in my 20's, thanks to a genetic lottery that came with a trust fund.  And even though I 'knew' what it took to be a rock star, I somehow thought that my skills would naturally float me to the top, rather than having to claw my way there.  But when shit got real, I knew what I had to do, and I got it done.  

It should be interesting to see the next crop of kids come through the office this summer.  Nothing scrapes off the sparking idealism like SEC regulations.














*This isn't what actually happened. That kid worked his ass off.

[Suu]

There's a reason why I'm back in school. Just sayin'.

[hooplala]

The current songs of Lady GaGa... Katy Perry... et al... are NOT helping in this matter.

[LMNO]

The current songs of Lady GaGa... Katy Perry... et al... are NOT helping in this matter.

"It Gets Better" doesn't mean people will get nicer.  It means your skin will toughen up.

[Cain]

The current songs of Lady GaGa... Katy Perry... et al... are NOT helping in this matter.

I always assume Lady Gaga is trolling.

Interesting celebrity factoid: Lady Gaga and Katy Perry hate each other.  Katy Perry, when not dressing as a virtual porn star for her "music videos" (which everyone watches with the sound off) says Lady Gaga does not have Good Christian Morals, like her. 

[Luna]

The current songs of Lady GaGa... Katy Perry... et al... are NOT helping in this matter.

"It Gets Better" doesn't mean people will get nicer.  It means your skin will toughen up.

This.

No shit.

[Suu]

People most certainly don't get nicer, you just learn to deal with assholes differently.

[AFK]

Fuck you I'm the nicest goddamn person you'd ever meet on this shithole of a planet!

[LMNO]

Oddly enough, I kind of believe that.

[hooplala]

The current songs of Lady GaGa... Katy Perry... et al... are NOT helping in this matter.

"It Gets Better" doesn't mean people will get nicer.  It means your skin will toughen up.

I was thinking more of Born This Way, the central message I got was "you're perfect just how you are", which can be translated into "so why try harder?".

[Suu]

There's an awful lot of "special snowflake" songs that have come out lately. Pink is also guilty. She's also a Scientologist now, which automatically makes her opinion on anything invalid.