How Fucked Am I (Approximately)? A Graph and an Extrapolation at Age 30

by Dan Barry

Imagine a graph. Time is the X-axis. The graph is my financial net worth over time, which hovers between $0 and $100 for the first 15 years of my life, until I attend an overachieving all boys school and unwittingly mortgage my future. I do this because adults tell me it’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re smart. This swift plunge into the red is followed by an even sharper dip at 18, when I enroll in college, which is a foregone conclusion if you attend a preparatory school. The last notable feature of the graph is a near-vertical plummet at 20, when my parents, who said they’d pay for college, stop. The graph takes its one, brief turn back into the black from age 21 to 22, when I sell my soul working seven-day weeks for the same high school. Total fucking mistake.

Welcome to Dan at 30! I just crossed the barrier into can’t-pretend-you’re-not-an-adult on February 23^rd. If you’re wondering approximately where the Y-variable of the graph is at this moment, I would say it’s in the ballpark of -$80,934.83.

I’m in my room, wearing my pajama hoodie. Most days I don’t leave the house because I can write my newspaper column—that’s the job tens of thousands of dollars worth of education landed me—from home, and then on Friday $125 magically appears in my checking account. I used to make a little more. In 2010 I grossed almost $8,000, which is spectacular for a freelance columnist. I also made about $1,000 as a first-year massage therapist, which cost another couple tens of thousands in education and equipment. So basically I made in a year what most people spend on a used car.

I think the thing that concerns me most about turning 30 is that I am essentially in the same financial situation that I was in at 22, engendered rather directly by choices I made when I was 15—and in all likelihood I will continue to be similarly indebted well into my 50’s, at which point I will presumably be able to start saving for a house.

By my mid-60’s, safe in my home, I will seek a wife to settle with me. We will insist on homeschooling our children, so that by my early 80’s they will know beyond all doubt that I will love and support them whether they go to college or not. We’ll give them time to make something of themselves, so I’ll probably be just shy of 90 when my wife and I experience the pleasures and sadnesses of having an empty nest. This will provide me with the perfect context for a mid-life crisis, which, if I understand the latest stock scripts correctly, now entails buying a fancy car and promptly losing it in the divorce. Back on my own, I expect to enter my 100’s buffeted by lovers, hobbies, and all the drugs I didn’t do in my youth.

Around 110, the AARP will start mailing me, and my pension, IRAs, and Social Security will enable me to move to a nudist colony in Florida, which I have to admit sounds like a hideous idea now, but I gather that the charm of these things grows on you. I hope to die a peaceful death somewhere around 120, surrounded by my divorce-embittered-yet-begrudgingly-loving children, whose own offspring will in a way make me kind of immortal.

[Thanks are due to Katsushika Hokusai, whose formula on aging I shamelessly copped for this piece. And thank you to Johnny Wander, who first brought the Hokusai quote to my attention.]

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Dan Barry runs the Dharma Liberation (Store) Front with his best friend Arielle and makes affordable meditation cushions out of environmentally responsible supplies. They're inspired by the Dharma Punx and the D.I.Y. ethic, as well as environmentalism. Check them out online at: https://dlsf.bigcartel.com/