The Saddest Things You Can Do In This Life

Search through Craigslist personals in any of the following American cities: Milwaukee, Cleveland, Green Bay, Flint, Detroit, Buffalo, Fargo.

Do the Wal-Mart chant before a shift of work at Wal-Mart

Eat fast food more than once in a day.

Watch someone try to be become a writer, musician, or an actor for an extended period of time.

Use a dating website or app.

Email or swipe or wink while using a dating website or app in the hopes of garnering attention from another user of a dating website or app who you believe is not as attractive as you but you email or swipe or wink at them because you’re lonely, and though you believe the other person who you’ve emailed or swiped or winked at is less attractive than you, they don’t respond.

Watch a YouTube video of someone trying to make it as a YouTube personality who has fewer than 1000 views on their most popular video, but they have made hundreds of videos, and in each of their videos they get really excited and tell people to subscribe and like the videos as they talk to the camera in a way which seems they have convinced themselves the entire internet is watching.

Write for the same website for years, uploading hundreds of posts but still, after you have done so, continue to be no more known then when you started, but then keep uploading posts, believing something different will happen.

Watch someone do that.

Read their posts.

Look at that picture of Kirk Cameron’s birthday celebration.

Watch the television show To Catch A Predator, especially when they arrest and question people who are stunted, developmentally. (And though I’m sure you could make a case for all the guys they catch on there being stunted, you know what I’m talking about.)

Watch that scene in Dumbo when the mom elephant cradles her baby.

Start a creative writing blog.

Make a resume.

Search for jobs.

Think about what you’ve done with your life.

Join a band past the age of 30.

Watch someone lift weights and listen to Creed.

Tweet something without getting any replies or favorites or retweets and realize what you’ve done is thrown a thought into the universe and now it is suspended in a vacuum that no one will ever know exists.

Listen to someone who is addicted to cigarettes talk about their Chantix pills as they smoke a cigarette.

Get any bag or package of candy and find it has mostly yellow pieces.

Watch a horse fall or get shot in a movie.

See a puppy with one of those protective cones around its head.

Listen to one of your coworkers talk about his life outside of work. For example, one of your coworkers spends an absurd amount of money, in the thousands of dollars, on getting his cat’s teeth removed, because, he tells you, that will increase the life span of an already dying cat, but the guy you work with is already in debt, you know this cause he’s told you, and because he doesn’t have enough money to pay for the cat dentistry his girlfriend he met on the internet does it for him because putting it to sleep is not an option for her, but her giving thousands of dollars for the cat surgery has upset her, your coworker tells you, and has put stress on the relationship to the point where he’s not sure if they’re going to make it, and you and that guy aren’t so different, you work at the same place and you’re both balding, and both of you do random jobs to support your real passion in the arts, so what’s not to say that in ten years you could be in debt to your internet girlfriend for thousands of dollars in cat dentistry?

Feel sorry for yourself.

Waste whatever talent you’ve been given, however small, by not giving it the proper care or the necessary practice it requires. I don’t know what the cap is, if it’s the 10,000 hours Malcolm Gladwell says, but if you have at least an inkling of a talent and you don’t work at, if you don’t give it a real shot, that’s sad because there’s just this life to use it. Though I could be wrong about that.

Believe that people go to hell for eternity.

Find a pair of jeans or a cool jacket or sweater at a thrift store and take it to the fitting room only to find out that there’s a weird stain you didn’t see, or worse, the garment doesn’t fit, but just barely.

Make this list.