Tag Archives: youth

Be Fickle

Change your look, change your job, change your apartment, change your art, change your socks (really, it’s gross). Change your lover; your lipstick, your coat, your curtains, your entire belief system. Cling hard, hasty and briefly to everything. Don’t commit. Remain an amateur at life. Don’t do anything long enough to get good at it or known for it; this could overextend your young, vain ego and send you hurtling into full-blown narcissism. Toeing the line between vanity and narcissism is worth the effort.
Be a jack of all trades. It’s the new renaissance, after all. It’s never been easier to call yourself anything and have the website, business card, shoes and haircut to back it up. Be an artist, writer, life coach, musician, healer, blogger. Be indie, punk, preppy, grungy, mod, hipster. Throw yourself into each of these identities and waste a year or so cultivating the image. Then, just when it feels comfortable and people have started to identify you this way, change. Re-brand. Constantly. Funnel all of your time and money into the accoutrements of each image and then ditch them once you move on. You can always sell your camera, rock tumbler, sewing machine, Tarot cards, ukulele, blow torch anyway. But you wont.

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Be Vain

Cling to your good looks while they last. Youth is the only time you’ll get away with vanity, pride and ego so wield these weapons carelessly and make no effort to disguise them. Seek out your image in every reflective surface and become entranced with this elusive, beautiful stranger.
Take the free drinks, backstage passes, bus stop passes, street worker leers and music store discounts while they’re around. If one thing is certain it’s that one day you’ll be old and ugly and no one will want to look at you unless you have a “personality” or “power” or something… So cash in on the cute, dumb stares and firm buttocks while you can because there’s nothing cute about some old ass trying to flirt their way into free shit.
You’ve got it. Flaunt it. Before you know it, you’ll be shaking your head and cursing quotes you used to herald like, “It’s better to burn out than to fade away,” as you stare at your bloated living corpse in the shower, having smashed all the mirrors on your 30th birthday. Living like you could die tomorrow only sucks if you don’t.

Don’t Have Children

This may seem counter intuitive, but having children is pretty much the only sure way to squash enjoying your youth as a meaningless void marked only by shame and regrets.
Nothing stunts childish behavior like an actual child. Children make you wake up, eat, and clean; life’s top three productivity staples. Let’s face it, you can always adopt. But you can’t always wake up under a pool table in Chinatown drunk and high at noon on a Tuesday, consequence and fancy free, if you’re a parent. Unless you want to deal with the guilt and/or the law. And you don’t.
So smash your biological clock and get a pet – a fish or a plant – something you won’t ever have to bury or explain life to, and that you can’t go to jail for killing. Go ahead and waste your precious and fleeting youth the way you want and the way man intends — single, sexually active and barren.