How To Even…Make a Budget

By CL Bledsoe & Michael Gushue

Imagine you’re a crab, living it up on the bay floor, eating garbage, crabbin’ around. You encounter some especially gross food (which you’re all about), ignore the fact that it’s inside a very trap-like structure, and go in after it. Hey, it was a trap. Soon, you’re lifted out of the water and dumped in a bucket with a bunch of other crabs. The sides of this bucket aren’t very high. If you all worked together, you could all get out, or at least most of you could. You could be back in the water in no time. But some crab just stepped on your claw, and now you have to kill him. It’s the crab honor code. You rear back to hit him, but you accidentally hit another crab, who now must kill you. He accidentally hits another crab and on and on until you all end up as dinner.

Now, instead of being a crab, imagine you were an adult human. Instead of a piece of hotdog in a trap, you’ve got a mortgage, car payments, various forms of debt. And also hotdogs, let’s be honest. Instead of a bucket, you’ve got a job. Otherwise, it’s pretty much the same scenario, minus those cool claws.

To put it another way, being an adult sucks. Everyone knows this, but no one does anything about it. We, as a culture, give away our lives in 8-hour increments — ah, but that’s not including lunch, travel time, and the exhaustion that follows. Is it more…