{Kids These Days} are So Entitled! Commentary from an 800 Year-Old

What’s wrong with this latest generation? When I see how these Epochians act, my 800 year-old-blood curdles. And as my body no longer produces any blood naturally, much of that blood was purchased from those very same Epochians—at ridiculously marked-up prices, I might add!

I admire the ingenuity, but it just goes to show: This newest generation is full of blood-slaves who have forgotten the virtues of charity and of giving back to your immortal overlords. These Epochians are nothing like GenX²—may they rest in peace. I’m proud of the amazing volunteer work they did in the Mandatory Organ Harvest of 23,476.

So many have said it, but it’s true—these Epochians are so entitled! After 4 to 8 years within the augmentation factories, all they can do is complain about their cybernetic upgrades! Some Epochians even go so far as to say that it’s pointless to have their genetic makeup edited, robotic limbs installed, and quantum microchips wired into in their brain. I say: If you’re not getting the job you want, even after all that, then maybe it’s time to go back into the augmentation factory and get a higher degree of nanosurgery. Get more upgrades!

And don’t come to me complaining about the cost—I may not have had to pay to be augmented, but I had plenty of friends who did, and they paid for their conversion with just a summer job. Don’t complain about 80 decades of hyper-inflation, or the 0.00001 percent, just get out there and work hard!

If you had both your arms replaced by a laser scalpel and a diagnostic ultrasound machine, being rebuilt for years and years until eventually even your childhood memories were deleted (to make room for a few pieces of hospital administration software), it might make sense you’d be disappointed not to get a job in your field. You’re not the doctor you’d planned to be—in fact, legally, you’re classified as a piece of unowned lab equipment.

The story is the same in so many careers: But instead of moping about how you’re a 3D printer instead of an engineer, or an entrepreneur, or a “human being,” why not try to find ways to apply your skills to the job you have? Find ways to apply it to being a barista, or a dog walker, or fighting in the Blood Pits! Nobody likes fighting in the Blood Pits, but until it’s outlawed (and how could something so entertaining ever be made illegal?), why not put those drill-fingers to work?

It’s not like you’re going to get things for free in this world. And oh boy, do you Epochians want everything for free. We’re not going to give you a meal-voucher for rations, just because you blew all your money on augmentations that we promised would help you afford meal-vouchers! Seems to me that you just didn’t budget wisely—whatever “budgeting” means (an accounting MegaCorp I know informs me it’s an ancient technique used by those without money-printers or wealth-management AIs).

And stop complaining about the health care system! You’re in the Death Lottery just like everybody else, bucko! Except for those like me, who are wealthy enough to buy a Death Exemption. Yes, almost everyone in my generation has a Death Exemption, but why do you think that is? Some would say it’s centuries of interest paid out on off-world bank accounts, free of taxation and safe from the annual Ultra-Depression, but I think we all know what the real reason is: gumption.

Epochians have no respect for elders or authority. So what if your mind is the most advanced super-computer the human race has ever created and forcibly installed into a human body? Your manager still deserves respect, even if he deleted most of his original mental functions for a BitCoin generator and a subconscious pleasure-palace. Who cares if he only communicates through pictographs and screams? Maybe if you showed a little more deference you’d be promoted, in the unlikely event that anyone from my generation actually dies (a probability so low, that statisticians recently had to invent a more advanced form of zero to describe it).

A brief side-note—what’s with all this new genitalia Epochians are inventing? Something about “using psionic-WiFi ports to create a mind-to-mind connection,” yadda yadda, nonsense, nonsense. Whatever happened to a man just settling down and marrying as many pleasure droids as his unimaginable wealth could afford? And all that unbearable slang! I don’t care if your telepathically-transmitted hyper-condensed tone-speak allows conversations so rich and complex that they’d take a natural human lifespan to replicate in English!

It’s the death of language, and you all sound ridiculous!

“Why even get a job?” say many Epochians. “The last generation drew all their power from the fabric of spacetime itself, leading to a gradual unraveling of the universe itself that will destroy literally everything that has ever existed!” When you talk like that, don’t hear anything about the greatest ecological disaster in history—I just hear a quitter whining! Where you see the end of reality, I see opportunity.

I don’t want to step on your toes, though—that’s a problem for your generation to solve. Mine? We have our private pocket dimensions to live out an eternity of fantasies inside of. We’ve certainly earned it. There’s a real universe-ending incentive for you to fix this problem, and I think you’ll all do great with it—provided you can stop being so lazy and get to it!

Thanks for listening to this mandatory thought-cast! Good luck out there—if you ever want to visit me in my gated private dimension, from which I run the Mega-Corp I own for all of time, BRING FAIRLY PRICED BLOOD.