A Millennial Comedy

It’s a Friday night, and I’m slightly tipsy after making a drink with a homemade shrub, cradling a frozen Tupperware of cookie dough on my lap.

I’m alone. Almost 29. In an apartment that’s due for a rent increase next year.

I’m thinking that I’ll have to regress and get a roommate.

I thought I was supposed to grow out of that phase.

Though I guess I should’ve popped out two kids by now, too, so ¯_(ツ)_/¯

[Cue laughter.]

Yeah, I know right? It’s hilarious. It’s like I’m a part of a whole generation that’s been structurally cut out of the home-buying industry.

Maybe I could cut out eating frozen cookie dough. I mean, half of the dough is tahini and tahini is expensive as fuck.

Who has ever heard of tahini anyway?

Unless you’re like every other millennial and buying meat that doesn’t get half its weight from antibiotics is too expensive, so you settle for hummus.

This might not yield as much laughter. I’ve never been considered a funny person. Too focused on my career for that.

I can’t be funny and work on my career and ignore every man who’s offered to knock me up to continue the human race.

(The latter speak in a special language where “no” needs more syllables. It’s a hassle.)

But hear me out.

I swear, when we all look back on this, we are going to find the millennial generation to be the perfect shitstorm for a sitcom.

Who wouldn’t want to hear about a bunch of adult children struggling to pay off their college loans while fighting depression and anxiety around the fallout of late-stage capitalism?

[Nervous laughter from the audience]

Seriously, though. Gen Z, see, they have it made. We get all the flack and then they can impress everyone else after we’ve failed to come out of…how many economic crises have we lived through?

Forgive me, but I think I’ve lost track.

While we are on the topic of crises, let’s not forget about the pandemic. It’s everyone’s favorite crisis right now.

One could say it’s hot, but that’s taking away all the fire from climate change, which has been pretty pissy that it hasn’t been getting the amount of air time it thinks it’s deserved.

Ironic, since it is literally killing our air, but who cares about that?

Doctors label me as hysterical since I have a uterus, so maybe it really isn’t as big a deal as I make it seem.

[Boos.]

Anyway, the pandemic.

You see, while the boomers and those who are probably the emotionally stunted offspring of the former that then pass their daddy and mommy issues onto their kids - I mean, sorry, “Gen X” - they just get to go off to their second homes in the middle of bumfuck nowhere while we pick up their pieces.

Namely in the shape of single-use masks.

But whatever. We’re the generation that’s supposed to be saving the planet, so it’s our job right?

We are also the generation that seems to be miraculously having less sex than previous generations. Which okay, fine, I haven’t been laid in months, so if we use me as a metric, then sure I can see how we are not doing so hot.

But really. Sex.

The one thing humans are programmed to do to proliferate the species and we can’t even.

Must be all the SSRIs we take for that anxiety and depression we feel about late-stage capitalism.

I guess we could use support doggos instead of popping pills. But that just seems like another way to get judged - like, we can’t just settle for avocado toast. We need the doggos too.

(Did you hear that Gen Z has even taken the word “doggos” and shit all over it? They just want to call them “dogs” - like, where is the fun in that?)

Well, now that we’ve spent all our money on distractions from the constant crisis that is our lives, doggos, and the therapy our parents refuse to go to themselves, and we don’t have sex, what is there left?

Perhaps it’s laughter. This is just a comedy after all.