Is it possible to make a difference without coming off as a left wing activist nutjob?

I am a graphic designer and I want to use my abilities to help change the world for the better. I believe in sustainable food production and reversing climate change.

I know I can create compelling work, but how can I help my audience actually PAY ATTENTION?

Fuck all the insufferably trendy beliefs that you wear like fashion accessories for your identity. Fuck your untested self-esteem and the assumption that any of your work is the least bit compelling. Fuck whatever social media follower count you’ve confused for an actual audience.

Do you have any idea how much of a naive asshole you sound like when you say you want to change the world with your graphic design abilities? You will never “make a difference,” whatever that bullshit phrase means. Hell, you aren’t even interesting enough to come off as a left-wing activist nutjob. At least those people have something to say.

Nope, you’re just another insufferable twat with a popular pair of pet causes and a vague sense of self-importance who thinks that just because you breathe air and have an opinion, you deserve everyone’s undivided fucking attention.

Sorry, kid. You don’t deserve shit. You came knocking at the wrong fucking door if you wanted someone to blow smoke up your ass and slather your ego with Astroglide and affirmations.

No one gives a fuck about your hopes and dreams, and you don’t get credit for good intentions. Compelling work speaks for itself, so please, by all means, feel free to go off into the world and prove me wrong. Then again, you should also feel free to go fuck yourself.

Either way, somebody needed to tell you.

“Age 25: Surround yourself with good people.”

I’m 25. This is the point in my life that I have reached. What is it about being 25 that makes this so obvious and so important?

Around the time you reach your first quarter-century, most of your post-adolescence has been spent establishing your identity. You’ve come to know yourself well enough that you begin making long-term commitments to the people in your life.

As you start forming intimate, reciprocal relationships with friends, colleagues, and potential life partners, nothing is more important than surrounding yourself with good people — not your education, not your career, not your hopes and dreams — nothing. 

Really, I can’t stress this enough. Choosing to build your life around good people while you’re in your twenties will have a greater impact on your future happiness than anything else you ever do.

What single piece of advice would you give to a 5 year old? 10 year old? 15 year old? and so on. It’s vague but I’m curious on what you’d find important for someone to know at various stages in their life.

Age 5: Never stop asking questions.

Age 10: Never stop questioning the answers.

Age 15: Don’t take anything personally.

Age 20: Let go of your childhood.

Age 25: Surround yourself with good people.

Age 30: Hustle.

Age 35: Let go of your bullshit.

Age 40: Change while you still can.

Age 45: Delegate your hustle.

Age 50: Let go of your youth.

Age 55: Go do that thing you’ve always wanted to do.

Age 60: Get the fuck out of the way.

Age 65: Let go of your legacy.

Age 70: Give away everything that you can.

Age 75: Stay connected with the world.

Age 80: Let go of everything.

My husband and I have been together 10 years, married for 3 of them. Even before we were married, but especially after, there has been a lot of pressure for us to have kids. Coquette, we just don’t wanna.

We like our lives just as they are. We get to take nice trips and drive nice cars. We just don’t have that urge to be parents.

I do flip flop on this decision every now and then, usually when a close friend has a baby or sometimes when my parents put the “you are robbing us of grand parenthood” pressure on extra thick. I turned 35 yesterday so the point of no return is looming ever closer.

Are we making a huge mistake?

Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, it’s you and your husband’s decision to make. No one else’s.

I’m sure your parents are lovely people, but fuck what they think. Fuck the pressure they put on you to make major life decisions for their sake, and fuck their selfish desire to become grandparents at your expense.

This is the world our parents made. The American Dream is a smoldering pile of shit. We’re stuck cleaning up their mess, and yet somehow we’re robbing them of grand-parenthood? Fuck them. That’s what they get for robbing an entire generation of the economic security it takes to responsibly become parents.

Fuck every last Baby Boomer who feels entitled to give any of us shit for our choices. They’re so used to having all their dreams come true, they don’t even know how insulting that shit sounds.

I am 25 years old, and I live a very “day-to-day” life style. I have absolutely nothing planned for life. I have no savings, no long term goals, no specific dreams of any sort (other than the vague “contentment with life”). When asked what my dreams in life were, I couldn’t even think of a single legitimate answer. I know the future isn’t guaranteed to me, so there is that. I realize I am still relatively young, but is there a certain time when I should start panicking?

Panicking about what? You could die tomorrow or in fifty years. Either way, your dreams don’t mean shit. They never did, except to the extent that they keep you chasing after that vague sense of contentment, however distant and out of focus it always seems to remain.

Make a plan. Don’t. It doesn’t matter. Sure, it couldn’t hurt to start saving a little money. Lord knows when you’ll need it for a college fund or a Disney cruise or a halfway decent DUI attorney.

This is the part where you’re supposed to keep your head down and work. Be productive. Be a good little consumer. Earn. Save. Spend. Have your well-regulated units of fun on the weekend, but nothing too crazy.

You’ll blink and ten years will have slipped away. You’ll still consider yourself relatively young, but the teenagers will already have started to confuse you. You’ll realize that you’ve accidentally fallen into full-on adulthood. Marriage. Mortgage. Kids. Where the fuck did they come from?

Blink again, and you’ll be fifty years old, just as lost and clueless as you are today. You’ll catch that first real glimpse of your own mortality. Still, no reason to panic. The blood tests came back negative. It’s only a minor procedure. You’re going to be just fine.

One more blink and it’s all over, a day-to-day lifestyle stretched out to its inevitable conclusion, and if you’re very lucky, your last day will include good drugs and a comfortable mattress. That’s it. That’s the most you can ever hope for, because even in that final moment, you still won’t have a single legitimate answer. You never will.

So go ahead, make a plan for your life if you think it will help. Have a specific dream if it makes you feel better. Just be sure to work hard. Stay out of trouble. Fill your free time with yoga and book clubs and fantasy football leagues and cable news. Do whatever you can to avoid gazing inward into that gaping void, because the simplest answer to your question is yes.

Yes, there is a certain time when you should start panicking. Yes, that time is right now. Yes, every fucking second of your waking consciousness should be filled with existential terror at your utter insignificance and inevitable annihilation. Yes, the entire human experiment is nothing more than a sick and futile joke.

So yes, go ahead and start panicking. It still won’t do you any good.

How many chances do you give someone you’re dating who occasionally says awful things? My benchmark for ‘awful’ is pretty low in most people’s eyes, I’m a self-confessed strident intersectional feminist.  I think I’m letting myself down by not kicking him to the curb straight away, even if I do really like him. He’s never made the same shitty comment twice and always apologises and seems to learn… So is this a dumb move, a time for patience or a case of me being a controlling bitch trying to force someone to change? Sorry for rambling.

The quality of your life will improve a thousand fold if you stop using apologies as emotional currency.

You demand them from others as a means of control. You offer them unsolicited as a sign of deference. Hell, you even try and sneak them into your language by saying things like “self-confessed” instead of “self-proclaimed.”

Apologies are built into the source code of your interpersonal communication skills, and even though you’re a perfect stranger, I can tell it’s one of the most annoying things about you.

This is one of those traits you learned from your mother. Trust me, you will do well to unlearn it. Apologies are not for everyday use. They are meant to be rare. They are worthless if demanded, and they are useless as a substitute for respect.

As for your boyfriend, chill the fuck out. I’ve yet to meet a dude who doesn’t occasionally say awful things. If you can call a guy out on his shit and he never makes the same mistake twice, then that’s really the best you can ever expect.

It’s interesting that you seem so nonchalant about death, but I was wondering, if you had the opportunity to live forever, would you take it? I keep asking myself the same question, but I can’t decide if things would become boring or lonely or numbing after a time. All the same though, the lack of existing horrifies me. Even if I know it’s my ego making me feel this way, that knowledge doesn’t exterminate my fear. So, would you live forever if you could?

Please. Our brains aren’t even capable of contemplating forever, much less living it. Immortality is such a ridiculous notion to anyone with the slightest sense of scale.

Sure, if science allowed for it, I’d be down to live a few hundred, maybe even a few thousand years in good health, but you can’t really go beyond one or two orders of magnitude from a natural life span before shit starts getting sticky.

I mean, what are we talking about here? Is this thought experiment one in which you’re a living, breathing immortal, magically destined to walk the earth forever as a biological curiosity? What happens when the rest of the species starts to evolve? Or worse, what happens when another mass extinction event wipes out every living organism except for you? (I can hear you wanting to bring up spaceships. Cool your jets, Gene Roddenberry. That line of thinking creates more problems for you than it solves.)

Then again, maybe we’re talking about some artificially reproduced form of consciousness where you exist indefinitely, snowglobed in a Matrix-like world. I suppose that could work too, but then suddenly we’ve wandered off the philosophical deep end.

Besides, what’s so horrifying about not existing? It’s really not that big of a deal. You did it for billions of years before you were born, and that doesn’t make you the least bit queasy. Why, then, are you so worried about the billions of years that you won’t exist after you die?