Adults tell children “No, you can’t do that. Stop that. Put that down. Don’t put that in your mouth. Only one cookie. No ice cream after eight. No watching five episodes of Battlestar Galactica in a row” and when kids object, adults tell them “When you live in your own house and pay your own bills, you can make your own rules.”
Then as adults, once we live in our own house and pay our own bills, we look at each other and say “Man, I wish I was a kid, because we had all kinds of free time and we could do anything and we could play all day and pull the legs off spiders and sit in mud, and if we didn’t have mud then we could sit in dust and make our own mud, but now we’re adults and we can’t do what we want and we shouldn’t eat more than one cookie, and we shouldn’t spend all day watching Galactica, and we shouldn’t eat ice cream after eight.”
We also work a job that most of us think of as shitty, and we gaze at screensavers that show exotic locations and happy scenes. We read inspirational quotes on posters and coffee cups and think “Yeah, that sounds good and profound: follow your dreams. Someday, someday…”
This is stupid.
There will be no place or time when we are lying on our deathbed saying “Thank goodness I treated myself as an adult as crappily as adults treated me as a child, because now, finally, I am as happy and satisfied as a– URK!”
Do weird things.
Be weird things.
Let kids do weird things, and be weird things.
I promise it’ll be fine.