Adulthood na scam.

My cousin’s WhatsApp status is hilarious, I highly recommend people look up the video it’s a short on YouTube.

But the truth is “adulthood is a scam” why, please tell me why did our parents not sing this to us as babies? As children? Why did they tell us about the ability to stay up late and not about how crap you will feel the next day? (If you are over 28 you will feel a late night the next day. Please do not lie.)

Why didn’t our grandparents not tell us? Why is it they sang songs in the 50’s and 60’s about love and not about bills? Why did does 50 cent talk about “in da club” when in reality enjoyment and self-actualisation really make up not even 10% of our time. If you spend 10% of your whole day on self-actualisation (and I do) you spend 2.4 hours a day on self-actualisation (I go for walks for 2 hours 15 minutes-2hours 40 minutes per day.) that is extremely generous of me. I take that time out for myself because the other 22ish hours can be very stressful (baring the ones I spend asleep.)

I have godchildren, I love them very much, I remember when I went with them to LEGOLAND, to Chessington they wanted it all, the entire gift shop. They would pick up the £5 toy as happily as they would the £70 toy and make just as much fuss over it. A day in LEGOLAND if you want to spoil your kids will cost you a minimum of £200 excluding the tickets for a family of 4. Trust me. To give your kids a fun day out is so expensive in this country. To self-actualise is so expensive. Books? You read them in a week but cost £8-10 that’s a £520 a year habit. I crotchet. I tend to buy wool about £30-50 at a time (highly recommend to 3 for 2 offer in Hobbycraft on WI wool no one is sponsoring me on this but I do it, it saves me a fortune and I love spending months on my various projects (I’m 180 granny squares into my next project.) Next is sewing. That’s £50 per garment. No joke, even if you want to make a cheap outfit…you can’t. £100 if you want to make a jacket. Thankfully, my other hobby, walking is free. Free if I walk around my village, which I do every day.

Food, is expensive in this country. And just eating well is enough for some people. Some people, in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland do not eat well enough to sustain life, they go to food banks. We are in the top 7 richest nations in the world. What about everyone who would love to self actualise, but spends all their time on keeping their physical needs met? Food, clean water and sanitation? Shelter? We have a homelessness crisis…everywhere.

So I have established for you that just surviving and self actualising on your own is expensive. So I guess if it is a scam who is profiting? Rich people don’t look happy? Suicide rates in the west higher than in the developed world. In the UK, suicide is the biggest killer of men under 40. So therefore who is benefiting from this scam? The truth is no one. No one benefits from this.

Until we realise that everyone is going to be some type of unhappy we’ll never learn a thing. The next outfit doesn’t make you happy. It certainly doesn’t make the poor child in Bangladesh who got up at 4am to go to work happy to make it. We basically move faster to avoid loss than to actually gain something. That is the reason nothing changes, because we are all vested in a system that says “suffer for your 40 healthiest years in order to be “free” in you least healthy years.” Sounds like indentured servitude to me (absolutely no disrespect to the millions of Irish, Indian, and Chinese people who participated in the hidden slavery of indentured servitude. God rest each of you.)

I’m not saying I believe in communism, what I am saying is that what good is me being free to ride a bike whenever I want if my knees don’t work? We’re not serving anyone, we’re serving the illusion that somehow this will serve us. That’s why everyone gets mad when financial instutuions fall. You put your dreams into those institutions and you charge them with keeping them safe.

I pray you find your own kind of happiness. I pray you are happy with yourself and you don’t let anyone else define you and what your want. That is the only way to avoid being scammed.

The next thing is education. Things they need to start teaching in schools.

Financial literacy, what is a loan, overdraft credit card, what are the differences between each. Why it is important to save, what a pension is and so on.

Emotional literacy but not ownership. We are teaching young girls that when someone is bad to you, you are at fault. No, empathise with the perpetrator because no one does things out of pure evil, there is always a reason. However you also have to let people suffer the consequences of their actions, and not take away the ownership for those actions. In doing so you are robbing them of the learning and you are learning things you don’t need to.

Faith as opposed to religion. Until religious institutions detoxify, we can’t heal. However we need God. A guy I listen to on YouTube is an atheist and yet talks almost constantly that society has abandoned God and so there is a “god shaped hole” in society which has been filled by narcissism, everyone thinks they are a God because they don’t submit to a higher power. I believe this to be true. We need to teach kids the love that Christianity, Hinduism, Sikhism etc.. all teach as well as what theism and theology is. Give them faith, not religion. Because I believe religion is dogmatic and is inherently harmful. It creates Zealots, and zealots of any kind are harmful. Doesn’t matter what religion (or none) they belong to. Just look at the UK and the 2 party system. We had a 3 week debate on a windfall tax because the 2 parties are dogmatic and refuse to give in to the other, even when the other person has a genuinely good idea. Meanwhile we’re in the middle of the biggest cost of living crisis in a generation and people have literally starved and been in fuel poverty whilst some rich people in London debated who is right.

Work life balance. What is healthy and what is not. Also, risk. How to calculate risk vs reward and how to be more entrepreneurial, wealth is ultimately created by entrepreneurs adding value, not people working in dead end jobs they hate.

Boundaries! When something or someone has violated your boundaries (not necessarily sexual) and then how to deal with that. Big corporations would think 3 times if they knew people were taught boundary literacy in the same way and to the same level as being taught how to read and write. It would also deter sexual predator’s which I can only find benefit in.

De-leveraging sex. When I say that I mean that sex sells. And the reason it sells is because we are all obsessed with it. Society is built for the dirty old man to think he is young and virle and the 16 year old to think that he can go on like this forever. Both are operating from a place of shameful perversion. We need to stop catering for those people, they’re unhealthy. Its like catering a marathon for those who refuse to run, i.e. putting the finish line 5 paces from the starting line. The standards we hold for ourselves are too low. Sexual freedom has become the new sexual enslavement. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. So don’t. Decide what is best for you, before you go making life changing emotional decisions. Who you sleep with and how often is in fact a life changing decision, you are altering your views on sex each time, you think its only pregnancy and STI’s that are a negative consequence of sex? What about the people who are living with deep shame of having been a “notch on someone’s bedpost” What about those who threw their bodies at unrequited love? What about those people who ended up with “revenge porn” and their bodies plastered all over the internet? Why? Because sex is a highly charged subject in our society, and those who have power with sex or sex to assert power can dominate the world. As a result we are ruining people’s lives because we are allowing other people to have power over them. That is why I assert that the legal age for sex should be raised to 30 because I’m 30 and I still don’t see myself as old enough to fully grasp the miriad of consequences surrounding sex.

Money isn’t everything- making sure people understand their own relationship with money, lack poverty etc… Schools should have an open conversation about it so people can be socialised to what poverty means, the difference between relative and absolute poverty. Both can traumatise another person.

Therapy. We all need therapy. If you are a millennial, you have been through the Iraq war, 9/11 the 2008 crash PIGS Eurozone crash, global pandemic Brexit, Ukraine and the cost of living crisis. We are not all okay. About time we acknowledged this. If we don’t heal we will live our lives in suffering and paid forever. Why? We don’t have to. Therapy should be free for all. There is no end of painful stimuli there should be no end of help.

Community. The air feels different in the UK for the Jubilee, we have a sense of community. A sense of belonging and pride, it doesn’t matter what you identify with, the local community, the black community, the Conservative party it just gives purpose. And a purpose filled life means that you can’t be scammed.

Consequences. We have a “save me” society where we always protect rich people from the consequences of their actions. From paying off slave masters for slavery to the bailing out of the banks of 2009 we need to teach everyone about consequences. If you smoke, a likely consequence is cancer. If you drink too much a likely consequence is liver failure, if you eat too much a likely consequence is diabetes and obesity. Consequences are important and if we continuously teach some kids they are immune, whilst teaching others that they are not we are breeding not just resentment, but psychopaths. Consequences for all, it’s the only thing that’s healthy.

Adult hood is a scam. We need to be the cops so we don’t get scammed and pass our scam to the next generation.

Rise up. Do better.

Grace and Courage.

Annetta Mother Smith.