Despite the horror it brings, you will become your father. Not because you will ‘sell out”, not because you will “grow up”. No. You will become your Father when you see that the world is 99% bullshit. That is when you will understand, and your resistance will fade to a distant bright spot that hurts your eyes.
Young people don’t see how much of human society is bullshit, or, worse, they think bullshit is extemporaneous, something that can be cast off through deliberate and stubborn effort.
Older humans know better. Bullshit is the core of humanity. If the earth’s core is molten rock, responsible for spinning the planet, gravity, tectonic plates, and sending volcanic ash into the air to settle and fertilize all life, so too is the heart of human activity driven and dependent on that steaming hot lake of diarrhea we all take for granted.
Take religion, probably the single largest source of bullshit. How much of what we do is thanks to willfully unanswered questions, inaccurate historical certitude, and the everlasting belief in the protection and influence of imaginary beings. If you think I’m talking about your religion, you’re wrong and I’m right.
Drill down from that big lie and you start to see the smaller ones we all tacitly accept. Anything political is not what someone really thinks, but believing it gives us a warm fuzzy feeling anyway. We all want to belong to a tribe, and we’ll say anything necessary to get in and stay in. Scientists spend their lives studying us, but we lie to them, too, afraid to expose ourselves. It’s fair to say no one knew the deepest, darkest secrets of the human psyche before Twitter, yet even in that pseudo-anonymous cesspool we can be banned or blocked or shut down for sharing what we really think.
We’re not even honest with ourselves. No, you will not start that diet. No, there is not a single circumstance in all the trillions of parallel timelines where that person will fuck you. No, your day is not fine, and you don’t like your job. No, you will not post this when you’re sober. And If fat were beautiful, no one would be compelled to say “fat is beautiful.” How can you change the world if you can’t stop the bullshit from forming in your own head?
We even lie to our kids, to “protect them”. The irony is, they eat our bullshit for 18 years and then tell us they’re pure enough to change the world. Haha! That’s the funniest joke of all!
My father once told me, after hearing a profanity laced tirade in a film, that “real people don’t talk that way.” He knew at the time, though I only suspected, his words were total bullshit. Imagine my surprise, home from college, when I had the privilege of entering his inner circle of friends at the weekly breakfast gathering, to find that he himself talks “that way” as he and his friends polluted the morning air like oil tankers on fire. And then I moved to New York where people sure as fuck talk that way!
So kids perennially think they’ll change the world because they see the truth, because, as students, they somehow levitate above it all, as they write papers and draw buildings and cogitate theorems that are mostly self-admitted bullshit, built on the backs of decades, even hundreds of years of prior bullshit, confidant as they stand on the thin crust of hardened, fertile shit their parents so carefully floated for eighteen odd years.
You wondered why your father sat in his study for hours or hunched over that project in the garage or sat in front of the sports channel with a beer when oh my god there are so many more important things to do like save the redwinged squirrel or fight for the rights of indigenous somebodies or holy shit climate change, man!
He knew.
At some point, you either climb to the top of the bullshit mountain or you get buried under it but at the end of the day no one is clean and no one smells good anymore. No, mountain is too positive a word. More like those sand pits you dug at the beach as an innocent child, that frustrating pit that never got deeper because the sides always slid in as fast as you could dig only the sand is bullshit and you’re not digging you’re climbing and the whole world is the pit and everyone else is there with you and your kids are crying and your wife is bitching and your boss is angry and the bills are due and the taxman cometh and every goddamn day on earth you feel like an asshole magnet sucking dry the anus of the earth.
So, no, you will not change the world, and, yes, you will become your father because someday you’re going to stumble off that floating scab and plunge headfirst into the shitty core of humanity, probably at the same instant, or more likely a few hours before, your semen brings into existence the very same progeny who will never, swear on God’s green earth, turn into you.