No, you don't have to ditch the video games and take up a "grown up" hobby like golf if you don't feel like it. See, once you're an adult, you get to decide.
Want to stay up until 4 a.m. on a Wednesday? Go for it. Want to eat straight whipped cream right out of the container? Have at it. Adulthood is being able to get into your car at 2 a.m. and just drive for no reason at all. It's growing past being dragged to Mom's church every Sunday and being able to decide for yourself what you want to believe. It's eating pie for supper. It's choosing your own friends and buying your own clothes. It's sitting three feet from the TV screen, just because you fucking can. It's watching a movie for no other reason than it has a lesbian sex scene with Natalie Portman.
That's not to say that there are no repercussions for doing those things, but by God this is your life now, and you have the right to learn those lessons in any way you choose. You own those repercussions. They're yours, no one can take them from you.
And the title of that section?
"Until You're On Your Own, You Don't Know What Freedom Is."
Imagine that, freedom to make your own choices, and deal with the consequences of them. Note the unspoken alternative force at work here. The pressures from government, the media, and academia to keep people from growing up, to infantilize everyone, to remove responsibility, remove consequence, to treat people like children.
Life gets better because you're going to make it better. Because you'll have the power and the freedom to make it better.
It's incredibly difficult for a teenager in the throes of angst or a college kid knee-deep in debt and stress to see any of that. Depression is like that. It shrinks your view of the world, it chokes off the horizon.
And this from a man who has dealt with crushing poverty for much of his life.
It's interesting, and heartening to see an article expressing the virtues of adulthood, of responsibility, even the need for stable long term companionship (as opposed to a sequence of one night stands).
This reminds me a bit of Larry Correia's Fisking of an article about people squatting in a house they defaulted on their loan... for years. And after years of not paying rent they were complaining about a lack of money.
Needless to say, the article tried to paint them as the sympathetic characters.
Correia was not amused.
And that is what it all comes down to. The above morons aren’t living
for free. Somebody is paying for their free ride. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. All of us that have lived within our means, sacrificed, and worked hard, are paying taxes to idiot politicians that are going to bail out these idiotic financial institutions that were idiotic enough to make loans to these idiots. So how does the news spin it? We’re supposed to feel sad that poor dumb Lynn can’t have a dog. We’re supposed to feel sad that some aspiring actor has to put on a brave face for his kids.
Bull. Crap.
....
/To all of you with such mean things to say, all I have to say is…. it
must be nice to be perfect!/
And that one random internet comment sums up so much about what is wrong with our country. I never claimed to be perfect. I claimed to be a grown up."
Why be a grownup when being a hedonistic, irresponsible man-child gets
you showered with gifts?
Well, as Mr. Cheese shows, self respect and self reliance and liberty count for something.
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