2/1/29
I just moved to New York, and people congratulate me for that whenever I tell them.
I don’t know why - It’s the most irresponsible financial decision I’ve made to date.
People always say:
“Wow Stephen! You came here with no savings and no job prospect? That’s awesome. Congratulations!”
Or
“Stephen, so you’re just couch surfing between your friends’ places until you get it all sorted out? Wow! That is probably putting such a strain on your existing relationships. You’re such a free spirit. Congratulations!”
“I wish I could just, not care, like you do. Congratulations!”
^^ The last comment was obviously from a fellow white. I say obviously, because the whites are the best at saying things that, which are sincerely meant to be compliments, but they are not, and it usually stems from a place of not being able to empathize with another’s point of view.
Also, my online MBA from Villanova University, which cost me $75,000 and provided no job prospects - People congratulate me for that on a regular basis.
“Wow, you went into crippling debt to Google stuff, and write papers? You’re so driven! I would have never made that financial decision. Congratulations!”
We congratulate people when they have children we know they didn’t want.
I have been told it is no longer polite to answer, “Oh man, was it on purpose?”
I am 29 now, but 25ish is when you’re supposed to blindly congratulate friends for their children.
“You yelled at a lady in a bodega yesterday for putting the more expensive cheese on your breakfast sandwich, but I’m happy you and your Tinder date are taking this huge financial step forward together.”
If you think millennials are hard to work with, imagine when we have a whole generation of illegitimate children born off of dating apps. We’re going to be climbing over our southern walls once the “Tinder Babies” become a voting base politicians need to pander to.
A whole population of children are going to have a skewed perception of love because they overheard their mom tell their dad she “wished [she] never swiped right.”
They will definitely learn differently than I was taught.
(Which was almost entirely from the musings of teenage boys. We would get together, and kids with “cool parents” would say things like, “The vagina and the butthole are the same thing,” and we just had to take his word for it. It took twenty five minutes to load a whole naked body on my dial-up internet connection, and I didn’t have alone time like that when I was living with my parents.)
It’s difficult to teach kids about sex when the only prerequisite for baby-making is proximity.
But, for now, we congratulate people for the babies they didn’t want. Subconsciously, we just like seeing each other in financial ruin.
We are very quick to congratulate people who have made decisions which put them into debt.
So people congratulate me on moving to New York, but simply moving to a place is not an accomplishment. The demographic movement of people throughout history suggests any population can just up and move from a place of less opportunity toward the potential for more.
So, hold your congratulations until I do something, but in the meantime, feel free to adorn me in free deli sandwiches, because that would really free up a big portion of my budget.
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