A Way In Which Being A Kid Is Really Shitty

Babysitting my 8, 10, and 12 year-old cousins is nostalgia-inducing, being as I too am one of three brothers and was once “that age.” The nostalgia comes from what these three kids do all day.

They play video games, most of which they suck at, and their attention spans are too short to get better at them. They play shitty browser games and watch shitty newgrounds videos and all that other shitty stuff kids do on computers. Then they suck ass at their homework and never finish it, and none of them do well in school. So their average day is really: do something shitty, suck at everything, and argue over bullshit (that one goes without saying). 

I think this is why I can remember all kinds of shit that I did in the past 9 years, but it feels like I never did anything remotely interesting up until that point; and even after that point, most of what I did was uninteresting. There’s an upward trend in interestingness as the years pass. Now, a sizeable portion of all the things I do are interesting. I don’t think this is purely because of my memory capacity, nor the degree to which I value things. Even back then, I know that I didn’t really retain my daily activities nor consider then something interesting. There was always a distinction between “something I’m doing which is important to me” and “all the other shit that occurs in life.”

I posit that I was nonetheless far more interesting as a kid than the three kids whom I’m babysitting. I had lots of ideas growing up and was often conceptualizing things like magazines and video games—not much has changed in this regard! I just do it with even more frequency and success now. But that’s not all.

Now, everything I do, I do well. I play video games and am good at them and sometimes complete them. I do things that matter to me. And I do them consistently, and have the attention span to work at them (though some will argue I still fail at completing things—I for one am mostly satisfied with my completion rate). 

Kids don’t even have the ability and self-awareness to take pride and enjoyment from the shit they do. The only time when they’re satisfied with life is while in the act of doing something which they seem to consider enjoyable, even though they do it so poorly and bitch so much that said happiness seems weak. 

God being a kid is shitty. (Yeah I lost my point in there somewhere.)