Behold the field in which I grow my fucks.

That's my motto. Or at least I like to think it is. More often, especially when I've caused more trouble than I intended, I throttle myself with guilt and collapse like a neutron star of emotions. I never said I was stable.

My adoptive parents were elder gen-x, and I reaped some advantages from that. I get references a lot of my generation will miss, I know how to use a rotary phone, and I was vinyl before vinyl became cool again. Go go retro Cleary.

I also learned how not to care about stuff that doesn't matter, and that makes me kind of an anomaly. At least that's how I see it. But I have actual, productive coping skills, a sustainable work ethic, and I don't blame my messed up life on PTSD acquired from the parental generation gap. Can you even imagine?

What I received from my peers and social conditioning is a raging temper and an overdeveloped sense of justice. Fortunately, my deficit of fucks keeps me from going postal. Usually. 

It's probably far more likely that the net result is insanity, but I like to believe I have a unique perspective on life. I get why "kids these days" think the way they do, but I also see the flaws in the structure of their collective outlook.

People are addicted to dopamine and serotonin to the degree that instead of being rewards for positive behaviors, elevated neurochemistry has become the norm. If you don't have that feeling ALL THE TIME, then there's something wrong, something that needs to be fixed. It's not your fault, it can't be your fault, you need other people to take care of it for you. Let go of that responsibility. If only billionaires added to the 4 trillion dollars the IRS collects every year, all our problems would be solved, world hunger would end, work weeks would be 25 hours long, and we could spend another 3 hours every day wishing we were like our favorite Instagram models and bitching about it on our smartphones.

Does that seem harsh? I don't think so. We need to connect with each other more, invest ourselves in each others' lives on a personal level, instead of demanding that all our wants and needs be met with the least possible effort.

I only have to look at my friends in the dating pool to see how messed up things are. The definitions of high-value men and women are a joke. The top 90% of women are chasing the top 1% of desirable men based on a stupidly narrow set of standards, which means fuckboys are getting all the action and shitting on women because they can. In turn, women are blaming all men for the actions of that tiny sample. Both sides realize their mistakes long after the damage has been done and good women end up single moms wondering where all the good men are, while good men end up gaming with their bros in the basement because they've been told they have no value. Life is shit and we made it that way because we let politicians and propagandists push us into identity politics and tell us our desires are only always and ever the most important thing. Truth and reason be damned.

If this is where your head is, spend a week in Kenya and get back to me. That's reality in a way most people in the West can't even comprehend. If you are reading this, there's a 99.99% chance that you are among the top most privileged 0.5% of people on the planet. Do you know what that means? On a global scale, you're the elitist asshole.

This is what happens when your feels enter mortal combat with your brain 10 hours out of every day. You end up exposed and raw and it's REALLY hard to hide from the truth. I don't claim to have all the answers, and I'm confident I don't see everything exactly the way it is, but I think I'm a lot closer to it than a lot of people ever get. Maybe that makes me insufferable. I can live with that as long as it lets me focus on the things that genuinely matter.