Great, welcome to the world. Have a seat because you can’t...walk yet.

You’re gonna spend the next few years in the psychedelic world of colors that make no sense but it’s alright because you can pee yourself and someone will probably sort it out for you, but don’t get used to it, soon they’ll expect you to use a toilet so make the most of it, and not long after that you’ll have to go to a building where they’ll make you learn stuff and prove you know it like times tables and the alphabet and whatnot. Maybe you still think you’re the center of the world and you can probably get away with that for a while - some people do their entire lives - but eventually you’re gonna start pissing other kids off so you’re probably gonna have to learn some humility soon, too. Got it? Good, alright. Then you’re gonna go to a different building where the tests are a bit harder and the subjects are more intense. They try to teach you stuff like trigonometry and iambic pentameter without ever actually explaining what you can use it for but don’t worry, just memorize it and spit it out and forget it the second you walk out the exam hall. By now you’re probably getting weird urges to do stuff to your classmates that you never really wanted to do before and now you’re gonna have to play a game for the rest of your life where you really want this kind of closeness with people but sometimes not everyone feels mutually, so you’re gonna have to hide it. Welcome to the world of dating, body language and sex. Yeah, you’re gonna like the last one. It’s gonna dictate your life and most of the films you watch and the books you read for some time to come whether you realize it or not. Oh, you’re finished spitting out all that rote memorization? Well, great. Let’s go to university. You need to if you want to earn lots of money which is obviously very important, because...well it just is, shut up. Look, everyone’s happy when they’re rich. Pick a subject. Not the humanities you idiot, something real like law or maths. I didn’t spend 18 years raising a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ philosophy major, cogito ergo broke all the time. Oh you’re finished? Great, well it’s off to the companies for you then. Tell them you’re a people person and you have excellent organizational skills and you work well in a team. Don’t mention your actual passions for landscape gardening or music, they don’t give a ♥♥♥♥. Just come off as generic as possible, stick it out for about 30 years, you’ll make good money in time. Only the sex thing is probably getting a little empty by now, and you’re craving some kind of actual connection with the opposite sex, or same sex if that’s your thing. Jesus, you thought getting people to take their clothes off is difficult, you try finding a partner to fall in love with. And even then, what if they get bored or you get bored or they go off with the milkman or something? Well sorry, you’re just gonna have to risk it like everyone else. Like life, actually. Some people are dead by your age, but you’re not. No, you’re still sad in a pit of your own mediocrity, feeling dull and stepped on by life, standing on a rock that’s spinning at 9000 miles an hour around a gas giant in an infinite universe, a product of 13 billion years of cosmic evolution but no no, definitely you carry on being bored and feeling like crap. And now you feel worse, because you know how great you should feel about everything, amazed and happy all the time, and yet you still feel like ♥♥♥♥. Well, that’s biology. Well, maybe your friend’s getting rich or getting married or getting pregnant or something and you’re poor and single and maybe don’t want kids, it doesn’t matter what Carl Sagan says, you don’t feel any sense of wonder at all, you feel like ♥♥♥♥, you don’t want eloquent prose about how beautiful the cosmos is, you want money to live comfortably or you want to be in love, and maybe you want children. Try books, there’s quite a few dead guys who are willing to claim they know what you’re doing here and how you can be happy but loads of them just contradict each other and to be honest it all comes down to you. You’re going to have to decide whether you believe in God or want to eat meat or support abortion or feel that life has intrinsic meaning, and whatever you do, people will ♥♥♥♥ on your opinions and tell you you’re delusional. Sorry, it’s a game with no winners. And now you’re old and maybe you’ve got money and maybe you haven’t, same with a partner and child, and now you’re two steps from death and you spend a lot of time thinking about what you could have done and Jennifer Smith in the fields behind your parents’ house when you were both 17 and how you should’ve said “I love you” and instead you said “Look, I’m sorry, I’m just not in the best place right now, come on it’s getting cold”. Well, no use thinking about it now. Jennifer’s probably old and doddery just like you are. Not much time left. Well, I guess I’ll just do it all differently the next time. Oh, there...there isn’t a next time? Oh that...that was it? ♥♥♥♥, I wish I’d known, because if I’d known that this was the one chance I had as a talking monkey in space at the best point in history as the smartest species on the planet using ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ magic on a daily basis like the internet and jet planes and smartphones with access to all human knowledge at my fingertips and the chance to talk about how cool being alive is I might have not worried so much about what people thought and their ♥♥♥♥♥♥ lives, and I might have just spent what little time there was making good art or doing good science or falling in love or just NOT BEING A ♥♥♥♥. Oh well, if only I had known. Which I did, but I just didn’t want to think about it.

Oh um, so it goes.