Absolutely Nothing

Okay, I’ll dream big. I’ll tell you about something beyond your wildest fantasies of wealth. An “unexpected windfall” could be enough to cover rent for a month or enough to allow me to quit my job. For the purpose of this exercise — and of feeding the tiny glimmer of hope my brain keeps locked up in the land of make-believe — I’ll proceed as if this is a mind-boggling, life-changing amount.

Of course, I would take care of the necessities. I could actually buy a house after an entire lifetime of living in rentals. I would pay off my parents’ mortgage and all the student loans getting in the way of our success. Maybe we would get on one of those crazy new space flights that private companies are starting to offer.

That’s all great and honorable. It would eliminate a lot of heartache and stress, of course. There’s one thing you can’t buy with any lottery winnings. The richest people in the world can’t afford it because it can’t be bought. Time is priceless. You can’t buy it until we figure out how to make time machines work. You can get pretty close with some shortcuts only the wealthy can afford, though.

I would quit my job, leave the hustle culture, stop climbing the ladder, and walk away from responsibility. I would have a small army hired to run my household so I can sit with a blissfully unemployed glow on my face. I would sink into my big, leather couch with a boozy milkshake and enjoy the weightlessness of everything being taken care of without a devastating mental load. I would wake up at noon, take an afternoon nap, and fall asleep late at night without a single worry in my mind.

I desperately want to walk away from the “grind” and pour that energy into my hobbies instead. God, what a disgusting obsession we have with killing ourselves to live. All this struggle for what? So we can live with crippling anxiety that we’ll lose our health and home at any time and die penniless? I think that’s the one thing Gen Z has gotten right: do your job, but don’t let anyone exploit you by rewarding productivity with more responsibility.

I don’t want to chase a promotion just to effectively make less money each year as inflation climbs. I want to sit back in my big, leather couch. Sometimes I can roleplay this fantasy for a few hours on weekends. It’s not as intoxicating as the real thing, but the dream is enough to make reality just a tad bit more bearable. I’ll just keep telling myself that while I make fancy slideshows for a living.