I met a man in the Florida Keys who rents jet skis at $150/hour. Since nobody jet skis alone, he makes at least $300/hour. When there’s no customers he sits around watching sports. After work he plays with his two sons. I asked if he likes his lifestyle. He loves it.

Later when I was in Miami, I saw the walking dead. Zombies. The working class people who wished they weren’t alive. I remember what that’s like… 

Wake up early. Take the bus with people who never make eye contact with you beyond a quick glance. Grab a stimulant, usually coffee, to force your brain awake. Clock in. Grind for the next eight hours. Maybe your boss is cool, but often not. Maybe your coworkers are cool, but often not. Find ways to cope with your physical or psychic pain (which if you don’t have yet, it’s just a matter of time until you do). Then hope the pain goes away since the only form of healthcare you can afford is prayer.

At the end of the day of doing hard physical labor that grinds your body to a pulp, or dealing with ungrateful customers you’re forced to smile at, your efforts are rewarded with the legal minimum wage: $8/hour. So 40 hours per week (assuming you don’t also have to work weekends) makes you $320—roughly what the jet ski guy makes in an hour.

Having an apartment to yourself is out of the question. Roommates are mandatory—you just have to decide how many you can tolerate, and if you don’t mind sharing a room with a complete stranger. Maybe your roommates are cool, but often not. Maybe your neighbors are cool and have the common decency to not blast music at two in the morning, but often not.

Whether at work or at home, your only privacy is confined to the bathroom. Except you never shit at home—you save that for work so you can get paid for it. You calculate how much per month you make shitting. It makes you feel like you’re getting one over on your employer.

Maybe everything in your apartment functions normally, but often not. When something breaks, it stays broken. You can ask the landlord to fix it, but it’ll take months for him to take a look. And when he does, he may blame you and say it’s not his problem. But your expectations weren’t too high anyway: when touring the apartment you asked if there were any amenities—the landlord laughed because he assumed you were joking.

You sit down in your bedroom with your frozen dinner and numb yourself with your drug of choice: alcohol, weed, video games, porn (because if your lifestyle doesn’t chase away romantic partners, then your low self-esteem will), Netflix, doom scrolling on TikTok, sports gambling (because the parlay will surely work this time and nobody loses forever, right?), Facebook, online shopping, YouTube—anything to help you forget you’re alive.

Before bed you brush your teeth but can’t bring yourself to look in the mirror. Staring into your sunken eyes would only invite the negative self-talk anyway. As a precaution, you wear headphones and blast music to avoid listening to your thoughts.

But what you can't ignore is the tightness in your chest that never goes away. Maybe it’s a heart attack. Sometimes you hope it’s a heart attack. At first, thoughts like this scare you. Then they become background noise.

You collapse on your bed but you don’t “go to sleep.” You never “go to sleep.” You pass out.

When you’re young there’s a spark of hope. You wonder if things will change. And with each passing day, that spark withers. But all hope is not lost. Rather, it changes form: you used to hope that things would get better; now you hope that things won’t get worse.

Don’t worry too much because you won’t be there to experience it. You’ll numb yourself out of existence. You’ll become the walking dead. A zombie.

Then you wake up the next day.