This Can't Happen to Me

They say that the great ideas occur to one while one is in one's early to middle twenties. I'm starting to understand why: with a baby on the way, a new job that is higher paying but also much more demanding, etc., at 28 I'm discovering that I am rapidly becoming that most despised thing: a bourgeois. Yes, one of those dreadfully conventional middle-class bores whose mind has calcified. I sense the borders of the universe contracting until the cosmos begins to resemble a cubicle; I greatly fear that soon I shall not be able to distinguish between the two. Suddenly the critiques of both Marx and Nietzsche make so much more sense to me, which is frightening in itself.

The worst part of this is the dearth of those who understand or care. "Dude, I'm becoming a bourgeois" is not the sort of complaint most otherwise interested persons would find intelligible, so one finds one's bourgeoisification advancing at a rate proportionate to the general lack of interest in the malady. Simultaneously, of course, one finds oneself becoming more inverted and idiosyncratic as one struggles to cope with bourgeoisification on one's own. My only solace is that the bourgeois mind seems to consistently lack cognizance of its own constriction, so I wait patiently for the Lethean waters of conventionality to o'erflow me. Soon the depths from which I longed to speak will no longer exist as a memory, or even as a theoretical possibility, and I will have become an adult.