Buckle up fucks, this is where we get real. Witness through text how a young man is able to utterly implode his own life and think that everything’s fine. It’s like the ending of Fight Club except the narrator learned nothing and Tyler Durden won.

Here’s the summary. In this fine year of 2016 (and a few months of the following year), I:

• Flunked a math course I repeated (and flunked) three times
• Quit my job
• Moved out of my apartment and returned to my mother’s house, living in the same room I grew up in
• Failed all but one of my classes in the spring
• No-showed the entire fall semester of classes so I could stay inside my room and play World of Warcraft
• Became such a detestable memelord that not only did I contribute to the greatest single example of why shitposting is a net blight upon society (of which I still avail myself up, shamefully): the 2016 election of the 45th President of the United States, Donald fucking Trump, but I submitted the most infuriatingly atrocious resume I’ve ever had the displeasure of laying my eyes upon to the Trump campaign. I wasn’t hired. Also, did I mention I was that rare breed who supported for Bernie Sanders in the primary, then went Trump? Trust me, whatever you want to tell me after reading that, I’ve told myself many a time. I like to think I’ve made amends for such a horrid lapse in sane judgment.
• Was such a deplorable social media gremlin that when I rediscovered my Twitter in 2021, I deleted every single post except for these two

Now, let’s start with the academic side of the steaming, torrid trifecta. As I said, I flunked everything except for a French love stories course, which I received a D in. I still think Dr. Brulotte was cutting me some slack giving me that, since more than once I was sitting in the back corner of the class playing the Grand Theft Auto V campaign while tuning out an interesting lecture on the themes of classic stories like Abelard and Heloise or Tristan & Isolt. It’s one of my great regrets, not paying more attention in that course. I had a master professor, the subject matter was intriguing and worldly, but there I was playing a game I already played several times before. I wasn’t even playing multiplayer, because I got banned from multiplayer.

Still, my spring semester was better than my fall one. Truth be told, I don’t think I even showed up to it at all. I’ve got assignments that I must have pulled from our academic website at some point, saved in my personal files. Perhaps that was an unknowingly desperate attempt by me to pretend I could still salvage my academic life, despite having thrown myself into games, shitposting and the true NEET life right about the same time the United States decided to see what shooting up black tar heroin felt like. In that respect, the US got lucky: it got a strong, if fleeting moment of euphoria before everything snapped back to reality and we realized we got into something terrible. I just slowly sunk further into comforting misery, having less and less reason to exist outside of the latest thing on my computer screen.