Oh The Disappointments You'll Know: Why You Should Be Making The Most Of Your Quarter Life Crisis

Kids these days don't know they're born. 

Back in the bad old days grown ups would have to wait until they hit at least their mid forties before they were granted the reprieve from the responsibilities of adulthood known in clinical parlance as the Mid-Life Crisis. Counting down the days until they could blow all their savings on rent boys and the kind of beverages that are so fancy they demand a tiny umbrella to shelter under, they would drift through the mundane activities of every day life while the wife that sat opposite them at the dinner table began to look more and more like a stranger and the idea of stabbing her in the face with a fork when she asked if you'd taken the bins out for the fiftieth time became an increasingly attractive prospect, if only to add a little spice to Pork Chop Thursday.

The meal that says 'I don't love you anymore.'

 

 

Fast-forward to 2012 and a generation of stunted adolescent-adults stand, trembling, on the cusp of entering the mysterious and terrifying realm of the Grown Ups. Albeit several years too late. Way back when, your grand-pappy would have been working the mines aged six and dead from the black lung aged 11, having spawned an expanse of spiteful progeny to fight over who gets to marry mam now the old man's popped his clogs. At the funeral, with lowered eyes, his survivors – the under-10's – would discuss in whispers what a long and lucky life he had lived. Things were different back then. Some might say better.

Chimney sweep or child sex worker, often there was no distinction between these two terms and a two for one promotion on clean chimneys and sticky bedsheets was a firm (snarrrf) favourite with the customers.

This generation of stunted adult-children are luckier than any of their ancestors had ever dared to believe. Thanks to advances in medicine and the art of keeping people alive even when they're pretty much over this whole 'living' thing, those coming of age in these brave new times can look forward to not only one but two, three if you're lucky and rich enough, crises in which you are entirely justified to spend all your cash on coke and whores and Topshop shoes.

The phrase YOLO – You Only Live Once for the uninitiated or those who can't hear internet acronyms uttered in real life (IRL) over the low-level screaming that rattles around their skulls whenever they're put into close proximity to any one under the age of 18 – is bandied about a lot these days and with good reason. You do only live once, so forget planning for the terrifying black hole of your future and concentrate on getting good and fucked up before you have to spend your thirties working a job you hate to save up enough money for when you hit middle age and are rightfully entitled to another total breakdown blow out, this time with a spouse and dependent children waiting for you on the stairs as you stumble in at 6 A.M stinking of sambucca shots and sexual frustration because you are old and fat and no one will fuck you unless you pay them and even then it's doubtful you'll get it up.

So stop being a cry-baby loser and go out and boff a hooker, dickhead.

Your loved ones may find it hard to understand your actions during these difficult times. If this is the case get nude. It also helps if your wife is also a bird of prey, because they are far more tolerant than other species.

Kurt The Social Anxiety Ridden Koala: A Cautionary Tale

One day there was a koala bear called Kurt, who suffered from crippling social anxiety. He was too afraid to leave the house. He had a girlfriend called Melissa, but he was too anxious to be around her. Sometimes they would talk on MSN, but whenever she requested a web-cam interaction he was debilitated by heart-wrenching fear.

The only person he could bear to be around was his mother, who only made him feel mildly nauseous. Kurt's therapist was a Freudian, and said that his problems stemmed from an extreme Oedipal complex. Kurt pointed out that most of Freud's theories had been discredited. Kurt's therapist saw this bold undermining of his authority as a demonstration of Oppositional Defiant Disorder. He decided the best course of action was to put Kurt on a shit ton of meds.

After Kurt had taken his shit ton of meds, he began to see his therapist's point of view. In fact, Kurt had depersonalised to such an extent, that he was willing believe that he was the kind of person who wanted to plough his mother.

Kurt's therapist was very pleased with Kurt's progress. Kurt had become so compliant that he had pretty much lost the ability to think for himself, but gained a whole host of new friends. But Kurt's new friends were a bad bunch. They used Kurt as a drugs mule. Kurt was so pliable, that they merely had to suggest that Kurt insert a bag of heroin into his anus and cross the state border, and Kurt would happily comply. Kurt was just happy to have such great pals. Maybe after the drugs pick-up, they would go for ice-cream sundaes, just like he always dreamed. 

THE END.

Wall-E Was Right: Why I'm Pretty Sure The Internet Is Killing Us All

The internet is the worst thing to happen to humanity since the Hydrogen-bomb. You might think this is an outlandish and wildly inaccurate statement and you would almost definitely be right. But after spending almost three days straight refreshing my Facebook page and posting pictures of small animals with assorted danish pastries on their heads on Tumblr, well heck, I'm burnt out. I'd just like to point out this isn't my usual approach to the internet. Normally I ration myself to only 20 hours a day. But this week I've been avoiding doing all the work I avoided doing over Christmas. And as we all know:

Honestly if it's not a bar graph I'm lost, but some boffins at Oxford made this (probably) 
so it's science.

Sure, the internet isn't all bad. It's saved an entire generation of young men from the shame of having to buy top shelf pornography in a discreet brown paper bag of shame that may as well have “FILTHY PERVERT” scrawled all over it, because everyone knows that if your bag is opaque, you're probably a sex offender. I guess there's some other reasons why we all dig the internet and if this was a rational, balanced argument wherein I carefully weighed up the pro's and the con's, then you would get to hear them. As it stands, this is basically what you have come to expect from my blog: the over-caffeinated ravings of a wildly unstable personality. That's right, I'm going to get all Michael Moore up in this shit.

As any good polemicist knows, facts talk. So here's a fact: THE INTERNET KILLS PEOPLE. Every time you fire up your laptop you have a 90% chance of dying. You could end up being strangled by your spouse for using up all the bandwith downloading every episode ever of Come Dine With Me: Extra Portions. You could die like that guy in the internet cafe when he sat infront of his computer for twelve hours straight. You could become addicted to pornography and furiously asphixi-wank yourself into an eternal slumber. You could even get addicted to World of Warcraft and die of shame.

Common side-effects of pretending to be a pixellated troll include adult acne and eternal virginity.

And, sure, you might say, these are all easily avoidable scenarios. Just step back from they keyboard, take a ten minute break, make a cup of tea, go outside for some fresh air. But you know what? People are dumb and they will stare at a screen for seventy-eight hours straight even though their eyeballs are bleeding and they can't stop dry-heaving from the everpresent stench of their soiled jeans.

Even if you manage to use the internet without dying, don't think you're safe. The internet makes it almost impossible to avoid people. You are always just the click of a button away from someone you really don't want to deal with. That guy you accidentally sat next to on the bus once? Yeah, he's not going anywhere until you've heard all about how difficult it is seeing his mother go through chemotherapy. That girl who stole your boyfriend? She wants to Facebook chat about their sex life in exruciating detail so she can ask you 'how did you ever let that one go?!' while you sit there, your genitals nothing more than a blank neutral space because it's been so long since you've felt the touch of another human being your body automatically assumes that you are an amoeba and reproduce asexually now. Pulling a sick day? Your boss just read your Twitter feed where you spent the last six hours LOLing about how much fun you had at Sea World and how awesome shaking fins with Shamu was while the schmucks at the office toiled away, wasting their miserable lives in the mediocrity of middle management. Well guess what, you've got all the time in the world to just get out there and live, because, hey, now your unemployed and soon to be homeless. May as well buy a season pass to Sea World and drown yourself in the conga eel tank. 

I've never read Moby Dick, so if a whale busts you to your boss via G-mail, you should definitely get all Ahab on him hunt down some nautical revenge.

Do you even remember what it's like outside? I sure as heck don't. Sometimes I twitch open my curtains to peek out into the world I've half-forgotten, before scurrying back to my desk, eyes, unaccustomed to natural light, bleeding ever so slightly. I've heard talk of a time before Tumblr, but honestly, I don't remember. My life has been spent before a procession of LCD screens. If I'm not texting my friends (that's hypothetical, because I don't have friends. Mostly I text the Samaritans Suicide hotline and they send me motivational messages like 'you can do it!' and 'be brave, soon the pain will vanish'), I'm tweeting, or tumblring or watching Iplayer. Human interaction that doesn't involve a protective barrier is pretty much impossible at this point.

So, what can be done about it? Well if, like me, you believe that Pixar are actually purveyor's of chillingly accurate Nostradamus type predictions, then humanity is in for a bumpy ride. In between the lost fish and talking cars, it seems as though the human race is heading for a lifetime of immobility, the loss of vowels from the alphabet and an inability to blink. Turn on, log on and let your brains dribble from your ears and out of your skull.

This guy ruined your life.

Disclaimer: I actually really like the internet, please don't make me live in a yurt.