Paige's Pitt News Byline

In the United States, there are 120 guns for every 100 persons. We are the only nation, economically developed or otherwise, with more guns than people. It’s no surprise that we also have the highest rate of firearm homicides per capita compared to other high-income countries by a long shot. We are a massive outlier.

Even worse, this column was pitched about a week ago. In light of the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, and so many other shootings that have occurred since then in such rapid succession, it is nearly impossible to give an updated number of mass shootings in time for this column’s publication.

Other nations, upon experiencing gun violence, have enacted gun control legislation, such as New Zealand, which banned nearly all semi-automatic weapons in response to the Christchurch shooting. When Australia had a devastating mass shooting, the federal government banned assault weapons, and within ten years, gun deaths decreased by 50%. The solution is so stupidly simple — if the US heavily regulates gun ownership and gun sales, we could potentially see a decrease in gun violence. Despite this, America holds onto its guns.

What makes America different? Obviously, the Second Amendment hasn’t helped us in our fight for gun safety. Neither has the gun lobby industry, with the NRA lining the wallets of GOP politicians. But when we strip it down, what is it about our culture that permits our devotion to guns? What’s the throughline when we look at every mass shooting in the past 30 or so years?

Their perpetrators are 98% male.

It’s worth assessing America’s specific breed of patriarchy whose tyranny is aided and abetted by the ever-powerful gun industry. The ubiquity and irreplaceability of guns in American culture is a consequence of patriarchy and its inextricable championing of violence.

To preface this argument — I’m not saying “We don’t have a gun problem; we have a masculinity problem.” An argument like that would be reductive and ignorant because the problem at hand is absolutely guns. But we have a masculinity problem, too. Violence and destruction are centerpieces of American masculinity. Ocean Vuong put it best:

“In this culture we celebrate boys through the lexicon of violence. ‘You’re killing it,’…‘blow them up,’ ‘you went into that game guns blazing,’ …and what happens to our men and boys when the only way they can valuate themselves is through the lexicon of death and destruction?”

Vuong asks, “What happens to our men and boys?” Well, they learn that to be a man is to destroy, to dominate and to wield power over others. Rather than measuring the soul of a man in relationships, experiences, love, or service, a man is measured by his ability to dominate others, whether through money, influence, sex, or death.

Violence has, in part, become commonplace because violence is an American pastime. Young people –– old people, too –– play games like “Call of Duty” and “Fortnite,” whose objectives are to kill. It’s fun to destroy — it turns murder into a hobby, albeit a virtual one. Not to mention, the communities of these games are toxic, sending death threats and spouting slurs over chats, which, if you are a young boy, can turn you into a monster pretty quickly.

When young people, mostly young men, experience and consume themes of violence for multiple hours almost every day, it can make violence seem familiar and therefore more permissible. A study from 2011 shows that repeated viewing of violent media can diminish one’s emotional response to violence, which can potentially lead to aggressive behavior. We see this aggression manifest in male gamers –– a woman reports that she was gang raped and harrassed by male gamers in the Metaverse, a virtual reality program.

It is crystal clear that these gamers live out a sick fantasy where it’s fun to perpetrate carnage, and their exposure to violence has numbed their sense that it is wrong. Flippancy towards virtual killing desensitizes people to violence in general, and it’s not implausible to believe this could be the process through which shooters become violent in the first place.

The messaging surrounding guns is wildly transparent in its appeal to men’s insecurity in their masculinity. For instance, this gun ad, which reads “consider your man card reissued,” blatantly deems their weapon as the key to maximum manliness. Male gun owners are even sending pictures of loaded guns held up to their crotches to “own the libs.”

This seems silly, but it’s a pretty profound reflection of how many male gun owners view their guns as a supplementation of their manhood. The wielding of a weapon, to men, is the greatest way for them to assert dominance, and American gun culture encourages and celebrates this.

The Uvalde shooter allegedly bragged to his internet friend, a 15-year-old girl from Germany, about buying bullets, and even live-texted her the unfolding of the shooting to impress her. This is a prime example of men believing that violence is social and sometimes sexual capital, that it makes them more manly and therefore more desirable.

At best, this behavior is misguided –– most women actively seek and value men who are gentle, kind and compassionate. At worst, it triggers killing sprees, all in the name of amassing clout and man points. It is harmful and it seeps into every crevice of American society, from our hobbies to our beliefs systems.

How do we address this? First, the men in this country need to have a reckoning with themselves. In order to dismantle violence, we’d have to be a completely different America, one that wasn’t born out of colonialism and white supremacy and sexism. Even though completely rewiring the minds of hundreds of millions of Americans is impossible, we should start unpacking why our culture feels so passionate about the preservation of weaponry. We owe ourselves, as well as the countless victims of gun violence, some more introspection.

I’ll admit, I’m not a huge drinker. Alcohol gives me headaches and makes me sleepy, so I usually won’t have more than one or two drinks in a night. That being said, I’m quite picky about what few drinks I’ll choose, and I usually will opt for a white wine or a cocktail, but only ever one with vodka, rum or tequila.

I am well aware that I have a traditionally feminine taste in alcohol. I have tried so, so hard to like beer and whisky. In the past, I’ve tried to down a beer when it was the last drink available at the function. I’ve even ordered a whisky- or bourbon-based cocktail to try to warm myself up to brown alcohol. I’ve probably wasted hundreds of dollars trying to acquire a taste I simply don’t enjoy. I think my desperate attempts to like beer and whisky speak to how misogyny and gender stereotypes have seeped into the way we enjoy alcohol, from marketing campaigns to representation in the media.

Let’s talk about Bethenny Frankel, former real housewife of New York City and current businesswoman. When she’s not bashing Meghan Markle or reviewing makeup on Tiktok, she is the founder of the brand Skinnygirl, which makes margaritas and wines, among other “healthy” foods and beverages.

I find it fascinating how the primary selling point for Skinnygirl’s margarita and wine is that it’s low-calorie. Sure, a low-calorie option is great for someone on a diet or someone with a condition like PCOS or hypothyroidism, but the fact that it’s very specifically sold to women, and its slogan is “drink like a lady,” just reads as misogynistic. This marketing makes it seem as if thinness is a prerequisite for the adequacy of one’s womanhood. Even the logo is an impossibly skinny female caricature with a perfectly garnished margarita in hand. This alcohol brand markets to women in the way every other product markets to women, which is by attempting to target and alleviate their insecurities.

The best example of this is the landing page before you can enter their website that reads, “sometimes it’s okay to ask a lady her age.” Yet another appeal to women’s insecurities — only this time, it’s not about thinness, but about aging! You can’t shop for a Skinnygirl product without confronting your insecurities because, after all, according to this marketing strategy and countless others, to be a woman is to be cripplingly aware of how ugly and old and fat and saggy you are, even when you’re not. And now that Skinnygirl has reminded you that you’re hideous and decrepit, you can proceed onto their website to buy low-calorie alcohol into which you can drown your sorrows.

The marketing for these gendered beverages has gotten to our heads. We’ve internalized the idea that certain drinks are for certain people, and in doing so, we’ve deemed feminine drinks silly and masculine drinks respectable and hearty. These ideas seep into both our media and our interpersonal culture.

Take the TV show “Scrubs” for example. There is an ongoing joke where JD, the protagonist, loves appletinis. At the 2:29 mark in the video, where JD is on a date with a girl, and she orders a beer, and he orders an appletini. The bartender assumes she ordered the ‘tini and he ordered the beer, and so JD accepts the beer with a deep-voiced “Thanks, bro,” and swaps drinks with the girl while the bartender isn’t looking.

This scene is such a marker of a widespread cultural phenomena I’ve seen time and time again. From an early age, I remember seeing men tease other men for drinking a glass of wine instead of scotch. I’d overhear it at family functions, bar mitzvahs and weddings. I’d even go on to hear it at a frat party where one bro said to another bro, “A White Claw? Awfully fruity of you!”

Fellas, is it gay to drink alcohol?

I think this is a microcosm of a greater issue within sexism. Why are sweetness, deliciousness and palatability — qualities that are associated with the boxes women have learned to squeeze themselves into — inherently shameful? I hate the way our culture mocks femininity, no matter who exhibits it and how they do so. And with that, the drink another person chooses at the bar has absolutely no bearing on anyone else’s quality of life.

Women feed into the yummy drink-shaming, too, displaying their internalized misogyny in the process. Carrie Underwood’s song, “Before He Cheats,” features the lyric, “Right now, he’s probably buying her some fruity little drink ‘cuz she can’t shoot whisky.”

First of all, Miss Underpants, we don’t disparage the other woman –– she didn’t know he had a woman at home. That’s so early 2000s. It’s the man’s fault, although Carrie Underwood does address the man’s wrongdoing later in the song when she smashes his headlights, so never mind.

Why is it a problem that the other woman delights in a fruity little drink? I’ve tried to shoot a whisky before, and I did, in fact, throw up because it’s gross. A woman’s pleasure and comfort should not be shameful, and flexing the fact that you’re so tough because you can shoot whisky only plays into the hands of men who see you as an object anyway. Real “pick me” behavior.

Anyway, this is my message to men — get that fruity little drink. Have a rosé. Encourage your buddies to order the rosé, too –– they’ll probably enjoy it! And to women — if you want a fruity little drink, go get it, and if you want a beer or a whisky, hell yeah, enjoy! I think if we threw away our weird cultural attitudes about who is supposed to drink what, we’d probably find our new favorite drinks. Also, beer tastes like piss.

If you’ve walked past the newly defunct Mad Mex in Oakland, you’ve probably seen the candles, flowers and love letters that mourning students left on the outdoor bar. After 30 years of operation, the restaurant suddenly closed its doors on Jan. 31. Many Pitt folk, current students and alumni alike, are heartbroken that their sanctuary of Big Azz Margaritas is gone for good.

In my perusal of online articles via Facebook, I’ve seen a wide range of responses to the news. Depression. Denial. Celebration, even. And who am I to tell another person how to grieve?

In their post, Mad Mex cites “ongoing staffing and operational challenges” as the reason for the shutdown. And said short staffing really ignited some hostility among the Gen X and Boomer Mad Mex lovers.

One comment on WPXI-TV’s Facebook post regarding the closure said, “Keep voting Democrat morons and we have a year to go with this idiot in the WH.”

On WTAE-TV’s Facebook post a comment said, “All those college kids and no one wants to work … boy times in Oakland have changed.” Another read, “All those kids in Oakland and no one wants to work to have spending money for college lazy.”

I’m really tired of the needless hostility that Boomer and Gen X reactionaries have for the culture of my generation, as it is not only misinformed, but it indicates that our populus is becoming further polarized and unwilling to exercise compassion.

Let’s look at the whole “no one wants to work liberal indoctrination lazy entitled kids Joe Kamala communism blah blah yada yada” bit. It’s just not true. It might’ve been true in 2020 when we had no vaccine and a massive spike in cases, hospitalizations and deaths at the end of the year and into 2021. It might’ve been true at the peak of Omicron in late 2021 and early 2022, too. But the community level of COVID-19 cases in Allegheny County is currently low, and we’re easing into a world that is operating at full capacity despite COVID-19’s smaller yet continued presence.

The unemployment rate in the US is at 3.4% as of January 2023. That’s the lowest national unemployment rate since May 1969.

And just for good measure, let’s zoom in on Pennsylvania. At the beginning of 2022, the unemployment rate was at 5.4%, and by November 2022, it was at 4%. As of late January, Pennsylvania’s unemployment rate dropped even further to 3.9%. So, “no one wants to work these days” isn’t true anymore — we are very much back to work.

Why is the keyboard militia up in arms about the supposed laziness and entitlement of today’s college students? Is it pointed to Starbucks’s unionizing locations? Or maybe Coffee Tree Roasters’ unionizing locations? Newsflash — unions have been around for quite some time. People have been demanding better conditions on the job in the United States since the birth of the nation. It’s a cornerstone of our working class’s history, but this Facebook revisionist history posits that little-b*tch-itis suddenly contaminated Pitt’s water and turned our salt-of-the-earth Gen Z progeny into bratty princesses.

In 2015, the employment rate among college students was at 43%, and in 2020, it was at 40%. But, say it with me, class, what happened in 2020? Right! Everyone went home for a year because a pandemic happened! There is no reliable, confound-free evidence that points to a decrease in motivation and increase in entitlement among college students.

None of these flippant blanket statements about the insufferable toxicity and full-of-sh*t-ness of my peers hold up if you actually get to know college students. My friends and peers are smart as hell and incredibly hardworking. Some of them are working full-time while they take classes to pay their own rent. Lots of them have University jobs, which, by the way, can pay as little as $7.75 per hour. They have double majors. They have full-time internships during the school year and beyond. Many are the first in their family to go to college.

It’s harder than ever to be a college student. When I was going into seventh grade, my class sat in an auditorium and listened to our principal speak. He essentially said to us that we are going to age into a global economy where we’re competing with professionals all over the world, so we need to buck up and become marketable. We were 12.

The pressure to over-over-achieve that my generation experiences has manifested in a do-everything-all-the-time mentality. To become marketable and to achieve upward mobility, students are piling on student groups, leadership positions, double majors, double minors, internships, volunteering and fast-tracked masters programs. So yeah, some students don’t have the time to work because they’re concerned about securing employment so they can, you know, buy a house and start a family and eventually retire, something that is much harder to achieve now. And many others do all of this plus a job.

It deeply troubles me that elder folk collect these out-of-context soundbites from the news about these awful, lazy kids and spew them onto the internet without knowing the truth. I doubt any of them have even spoken to a college-aged person within the past year — otherwise, they’d likely see things differently. Their vitriol points to not only the political polarization of a post-Trump populus, but of a culture whose eyes are glued to a TV screen, not to each other. If these embittered Gen Xers and Boomers got to actually know young people these days, they’d know that we have an exceptional work ethic, but we don’t put up with mistreatment or disrespect. Their chagrin towards our desire for human and corporate decency is really terrifying — it’s almost as if they want us to suffer the way they did.

To my Facebook comment section grumblers — you’ve lost the plot. Find your compassion and seek to understand rather than seeking to be understood. Willfully looking for the worst in an entire generation will do nothing but further poison our culture. And get off your ass, log off of Facebook and work.

Last week, Pittsburgh City Council president Theresa Kail-Smith proposed legislation that would enforce a curfew for Pittsburgh minors. While the curfew has been on the books for decades, law enforcement hasn’t enforced it since 2004.

The curfew would last from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. Sunday through Thursday, and midnight to 6 a.m. on Friday and Saturday in July and August. During the rest of the year, the curfew would be from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. Sunday through Thursday and midnight to 6 a.m. on Friday and Saturday. There are exceptions, including for work or in emergencies, but for minors without these excuses, their late nights could end at a curfew center with a fine of up to $300.

The proposed system is meant to protect our youth, as Pittsburgh saw a 26% increase in homicides last year. The victims of said homicides were mostly Black men aged 15-24. However, if we want to make our communities safer, reinforcing the defunct curfew policy is not the way to do it.

Pittsburgh’s former curfew center closed in 2004 –– and its operation was a “logistical and financial nightmare,” Tracy Royston, former Pittsburgh youth services manager, told Pittsburgh City-Paper. Royston also recalls that usage rates of the centers were “very low,” and that they “would go weeks without having anybody.”

The more troubling concern with this legislation is an increased police presence. It’s no secret that law enforcement overpolices Black, low-income communities, and Pittsburgh is no exception. So naturally, since police are enforcing the curfews, there will be an increase in interactions between Black and Brown youth and law enforcement.

Seeking a young person of color late at night and asking for their ID is stop-and-frisk — not to mention, Mayor Ed Gainey’s office noted that it is unlawful to ask for ID without probable cause. It takes a certain level of delusion to think such a measure will protect our youth rather than leaving them vulnerable to an adverse, potentially fatal encounter with the law.

Kail-Smith even said the solution, which stipulates a potential fine of up to $300, is “not necessarily punitive, but helpful.” The “necessarily” in this sentence is going to get a hernia from the heavy lifting it’s doing. How is a $300 fine for a low-income individual — or any individual, for that matter –– not a punitive measure? If you call something that is inherently punitive “not punitive,” it doesn’t make it not punitive.

Kail-Smith acknowledges that other cities are implementing curfews. In a city council meeting last Wednesday, she said, “Other cities are doing this … They’re doing it in D.C., they’re doing it in Chicago.” And she’s right –– many cities have used juvenile curfew laws dating back to the 90s. However, countless studies have ultimately concluded that there is not enough evidence to support the claim that juvenile curfews reduce crime or violence.

The proposed deadline for opening the curfew centers is May 31. Still, Kail-Smith’s vision is half-baked, if not raw. She said to City-Paper, “I don’t necessarily know that it should be police enforcing it, versus some of the social workers that we have that are running a center.” You don’t know? That’s convenient.

Kail-Smith did mention that Pittsburgh could house the curfew centers in community centers and other municipal buildings. She also notes that they’ll staff curfew centers with social workers.

But let’s be real for a second — if you held a bachelor’s or master’s degree in social work, would you ever work from the hours of midnight to 6 a.m.? How is the City going to find willing and able staff to operate these centers? What are the “resources” Kail-Smith vaguely points to? I don’t have much faith in this plan –– an empty room with fold-out chairs, self-help pamphlets and Capri-Suns is not going to cut it.

An obvious first step to curbing gun violence would be gun control legislation. Major Crimes Commander Richard Ford said in 2022, 469 firearms were reported stolen in Pittsburgh. Police recovered 940 firearms last year and 54 ghost guns, meaning they are not trackable. A more robust gun buy-back program in Western Pennsylvania, while not a fix-all solution, could keep some ghost guns and stolen guns out of circulation. Although we need to see less gun violence, Pennsylvania’s GOP continues to block common-sense gun safety legislation, which only hurts the cause.

Still, there are so many brilliant, passionate people in Pittsburgh who are working day in and day out to help disenfranchised youth. The City offered STOP the Violence grants to multiple groups addressing violence last summer. These projects entail free programs for high-risk kids –– sports, arts, academics –– as well as mentoring, support groups, mental health services that specialize in minority communities and so much more. The Plan for Peace included $9 million for the Reaching out on the Streets program, which also provides mental health services.

Yet lo and behold, Kail-Smith’s initial response to the Plan for Peace’s $9 million expansion was, “That $9 million is a lot of money that could pay for a lot of police officers.” I wonder what seasoning Kail-Smith uses before she licks the boot. Paprika? Chili powder?

Kail-Smith wants the same thing we want — a safe Pittsburgh for our most vulnerable people. But she doesn’t want to listen to the activists –– most of whom are people of color –– who are doing grassroots, community-driven work. These solutions take a lot longer than one year. Camille Baskin, the mother of Maleek Thomas, a young Black man who was shot and killed in Pittsburgh last year, explains that programs “need to get ahold of [youth] while they’re in elementary school — make them want more than what they’re seeing, what they’re living. Kids need to see that there’s more out here, but they need to see it starting young, not when their brains have already been heavily corrupted.”

With Baskin’s words in mind, legislators need to consider that anti-violence solutions are a marathon, not a sprint, and they likely require a new generation of Yinzers to age into a safer, brighter future. Councilman Reverend Ricky Burgess agrees with Baskin, noting that violence prevention programs “can’t be judged in a year. You have to make a commitment to the work over decades.”

What happened to the conversations we had in June of 2020 at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement? We know that communities of color have a tense relationship with law enforcement. We know that law enforcement disproportionately inflicts violence upon Black people. We know that stop, question and frisk breeds further discontentment with policing among Black and Brown communities. And yet, we’re still coming up with these out-of-touch Band-Aid solutions.

There are Black and Brown people doing the work in this City, and they have said, over and over again, that it takes time to see the payoff. White elected officials like Kail-Smith need to stop trying to hijack the community-based initiatives that Black activists have proposed. Aggressive, punitive solutions will only poison our efforts. There are real people with lived experiences who know the problems — and they know the solutions. Listen to them.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the controversial “Parental Rights in Education” bill on Monday, also known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. The bill prohibits classroom instruction involving gender identity and sexual orientation, specifically for children in kindergarten through grade three, or “in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate.”

And maybe I’m crazy, but … does anyone else think this is like, super effective, necessary legislation?

No, seriously. Because developmentally inappropriate discussion of sexual orientation desperately needs addressing! I mean, don’t you guys remember that completely real day in kindergarten where our teachers used two Barbies and two G.I. Joe action figures to simulate gay sex in vivid detail? Mortifying. We need to regulate these kinds of lessons, which, might I remind you, definitely happen.

Everybody knows that children have never been gay until recent history. There was definitely no devastating epidemic — exacerbated by an apathetic Republican administration — that wiped out an entire generation of queer people. The growing population of LGBTQ+ people is all because of the woke public school curriculum. English classes reading “The Color Purple”? Gay. AP Government and Politics covering Obergefell v. Hodges? Queer propaganda. Homozygous genotypes in biology? HOMO?!?! Gay.

If our schools don’t address queerness, then kids won’t ever know queer people exist! Floridian children don’t have lives outside of the classroom. Every morning, an alligator chases them for five miles to school. Exhausted from a day of learning, they go to bed promptly at 4 p.m. There are no children with gay parents, especially not in South Beach, where you can get a good ol’ heterosexual french toast at a drag queen-free brunch. Florida — aside from the snowflake-appeasing public school curriculum — is a completely straight, cisgender state. Once you exit the state and enter Georgia, glitter assaults the windshield of your 2013 Honda Civic and “Rain On Me” by Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande reverberates through the interstate like a tornado warning.

If we were to address homosexuality with our students, we would have to address homophobia. But why address something that doesn’t exist anymore? Everybody knows that Hilary Duff ended homophobia with an earth-shattering public service announcement. Problem solved.

And not to mention, this bill is perfect for young queer educators! After all, they keep saying “do not perceive me” on TikTok. Now, we are largely barred from teaching about fundamental aspects of their identities. You’re welcome, teachers! There will be virtually no dissent, which we wouldn’t have to worry about anyway because it’s not like teachers are currently quitting en masse or anything. That’d be crazy!

Like I said about backlash — there is none! Now, I know what you’re thinking. What about this video of Florida high school students walking out to protest the bill? Fake news. This is actually a site-specific immersive production of the play “The Laramie Project.” And thank heavens “Don’t Say Gay” might prohibit high school theater programs from ever performing “The Laramie Project” again. The play’s content is way too heavy, and high school actors aren’t good enough to perform it. High school theater programs can just mount “The Crucible” for the fourth time in 20 years. Besides, arts programs don’t have the budget for new sets and costumes. Reduce, reuse, recycle, am I right?

Ultimately, this legislation has one goal — keep parents comfortable in their inability to foster difficult conversations. I mean, God forbid little Huxley comes home and asks, “Mommy, how is it that my friend Kaighleigh has two mommies? I’ve never seen that before.” Mom could say, “You know how Daddy and I loved each other before he left us for his cousin? Kaighleigh’s mommies love each other like that, too.” But that’s too much pressure! Instead, Florida moms will panic and Naruto run into their gator-proofed pools to create a diversion.

In all seriousness, this legislation is stupid, needless and harmful. Times are changing, and we need to change with them. We can’t pretend queer people don’t exist. Kids will be born queer no matter what we do and, lucky for us, we are bringing them up in a more vibrant, accepting world. It’s time to brave what we don’t know and choose love and life for our nation’s children.

In the song “Nothing New,” Taylor Swift sings, “How can a person know everything at 18 but nothing at 22?” And oh my god, is that not the most poignant thing in the world.

When I graduated from high school in 2018, I was ready to begin my theater degree at Northwestern, star in every production, graduate with honors and head right to Broadway. A transfer, nine-month “gap year,” pandemic and many therapy sessions later, I don’t even want to act professionally anymore.

Maybe you’re considering a new path, too. You might be on the fence about dropping some grueling or unfulfilling track. Perhaps you’re considering transferring or even dropping out. But something is holding you back. In this column, I give you permission to give up. Do it. Give up. You owe it to your peace of mind.

With all the tailgates, frat parties and classes, we seldom sit down to remind ourselves how much profound and terrifying change we are experiencing. Leaving what is often the cushiness of your parents’ home for independent living is really jarring. Also, the average age of onset for addiction, personality disorders, depression and anxiety is about 20 years old.

Between your changing mind, new living situation, more intense studies and a slew of new and potentially traumatic experiences, you’re going through a lot right now. Not to mention, your frontal lobe is continuing to develop, so you may be approaching big decisions more pragmatically.

Your mind is literally changing. Give yourself some grace.

A 2020 survey showed that nearly 40% of college students experience depression, and one-third of college students experience anxiety. That being said, those who are not struggling with their mental health are sometimes loud about how well they’re doing, and even those who are struggling like to project that they’re doing just fine. It’s a supremely obnoxious phenomenon I call The Masochist Olympics.

“I’ve been so busy I forgot to eat!” “I didn’t sleep last night because I stayed up studying.” And for some reason, people think this is a flex. Newsflash — these people are not more successful than you for torturing themselves. If anything, they’re failing to strike a healthy balance in their lives. You know what happens when you torture yourself? Your passion dissolves. You get burnt out.

Let’s say you’re pre-med and hate it. You’re depressed and find no joy in studying and working. If you’re miserable doing the work now, you’re going to be even more miserable later! Plus, you will have spent all those years in school and in residency paying offensively high tuition only to hate it. If anything, undergrad is the best time to decide to give up on med school or whatever else isn’t satisfying your wants and needs. It’ll save you a lot of time, money and stress.

You can also give up now and return to your dreams later! The first couple years of college are a crash course — emphasis on the crash.

Personally, I was far from home with multiple undiagnosed mental illnesses, and a little fish in a pond of 400 other ridiculously talented theater students. It was a perfect storm of awful and, inevitably, it landed me in the worst mental and emotional health of my life.

But I could probably conquer the vigor of my old program now that I’m healthier and better supported. That being said, maybe right now isn’t your time. You can take care of yourself and come back to work when you’re ready. I’m graduating college at 23, and am not ashamed of that. Whoever taught you that you have to graduate in three to four years and cartwheel straight into a dream job and a newly renovated West Village apartment with in-unit laundry needs to, respectfully, be slapped.

It’s also important to ask yourself, “Who is this for if not for me?” Are you trying to one-up your siblings? Are you trying to impress people from your high school? I have news for you. Everyone from high school has unfollowed you on Instagram. I know this because the day I graduated high school, I unfollowed about 200 people.

So now you’ve decided to give up. What’s next? When I was battling depression in the wake of my previous schooling, I went into an intensive outpatient program. In my individual therapy session, my therapist showed me this worksheet that discusses life values. It is a strategy in dialectical behavioral therapy, or DBT, that helps you identify your purpose and set suitable goals.

Maybe you value your interpersonal relationships. Maybe you value being part of a community. Whatever it is, any of these life values are perfectly acceptable. You don’t need to be the first doctor-lawyer-astronaut-activist-actor nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court. Being unambitious is not a moral failing. You can literally just be someone in sales who hangs out and has a life outside work.

So you’ve given up. Now what’s next? I think my greatest advice is this: What work makes you love yourself? What makes you feel smart? What makes you feel invigorated? For me, it was always writing. I always felt good when I wrote a sentence and liked how it sounded. That always felt better to me than performing. Which is why, now, I meet with my lovely editors and write my silly little columns that you all hopefully enjoy. And you know what? I feel good.

Just please, do something that brings you joy. When people love what they do, they do better. And when one person does better, their family does better, their friends do better and the people they serve do better. I think the world would be a better place if everyone did what they loved.

Much to my detriment, I am woefully, chronically online.

I spend an embarrassing amount of hours on social media subjecting myself to the stupidity of humankind. In my opinion, Twitter is the perfect venue for such internet-aided brain frying. The folks that populate Twitter are not there to flaunt their gorgeous, skinny lives a-la-Instagram — they are there to projectile vomit into the void. Twitter gives you a Shein bikini that doesn’t fit and an empty sunscreen bottle and says, “Hop on in, the water’s fine!” except the water is piss. In this peepee pool, we grieve the deaths of our favorite celebrities in ways that make the One Direction Wattpad girlies look like recipients of the Pulitzer Prize.

I first stumbled upon a heaven fanfiction of Virgil Abloh, Kobe and Gigi Bryant, Juice Wrld, Pop Smoke and Betty White whose misuse of quotation marks could violate the Geneva Convention. Then, this bizarre photoshop of Jeopardy!: Deceased Celebrity Edition made me regret having eyes. Finally, I found the cherry on top — Kerry Washington’s imagining of a DMX X Prince Philip afterlife collab, which is an egregious waste of everyone’s time. The disease has infected the celebrities, too! It’s just like the time Tom Hanks got COVID-19.

This new-ish trend of fictionalizing a cultural figure’s transition to the afterlife is not only cringeworthy, but it speaks to the narcissism of the digital age, parasocial interaction, deep cultural insensitivity and just an adamant refusal to think critically.

I have never experienced adult life without social media, so I can’t accurately speak to a major shift in our culture. I pose a question to my older readers — have people always been this tasteless about celebrity deaths? It can’t just be a Gen-Z thing, so save your foaming-at-the-mouth “this generation!” rant for happy hour at your townie bar. It’s almost always the Hillary-Clinton-Kamala-Harris-Buzzfeed-HelloFresh-heckin-doggo-Target-Pride-Month-Collection millennial neolibs who are performing their grief. It takes a certain level of delusion to think, “I am Katharine. I am a barista. Poet. Artist. Dog mom. Visionary. And my 231 followers want to hear what I HAVE TO SAY about the death of Betty White!” Has Katharine seen an episode of “The Golden Girls?” No. But she knows exactly what transpired at the gates of heaven because fun fact — Katharine is God, and God is a woman with bangs and that, my friends, is feminism.

Why must you, a person who has never met this figure, broadcast your grief? You’re not a friend or a loved one. You’re Dave from IT. If you want attention for your creative prowess, audition for your community theater production of “The Mystery of Edwin Drood.” Stop clogging my brain pipes with this toxic waste. Bob Saget was America’s Dad? What about your own dad? You know, the dad who wrote you into his will? The dad who paid for your master’s degree? Danny Tanner didn’t teach you how to ride a bike, you buffoon. Call your father. He wants to tell you about his new Peloton and also ask you for help because he doesn’t know how to use it.

Maybe I’d tolerate the blithering idiocy of these tweets if they were historically accurate. But the image of RBG, John Lewis and John McCain celebrating Joe Biden’s election together?! And they’re drinking champagne?! THESE PEOPLE WOULD NEVER HANG OUT! This nightmare blunt rotation has the same energy as you and your third cousin at a family reunion — small talk for three agonizing minutes before you escape to the Costco charcuterie spread, find your mother and beg her to load the family back into the Jeep Patriot.

A lot of these keyboard devotees are forgetting that not everyone is a Christian, and not everyone wants to be honored in the context of the afterlife. Someone with the name Ginsburg does not subscribe to the concept of heaven or hell, as Jewish religious texts leave the afterlife mostly undiscussed. Between “RIP Stephen Sondheim,” people scheduling meetings on Rosh Hashanah and claims of the “War on Christmas,” it becomes more apparent to me every day that the American psyche has been colonized into flippancy. People don’t care about Jews, and I know this because I had swastikas etched into my desks in high school — but that’s a story for another day. Jews are not the only folks who are subject to this stupidity though. Both Buddhists and Hindus believe in the concept of samsara, which is essentially the reincarnation of the soul until one reaches enlightenment, and even that’s a gross simplification. If you really care about honoring your hero’s legacy, maybe know something about their culture. I hate to be like “Name three of their songs,” but seriously, name three of their songs, for the love of Hashem.

I understand it hurts to see a personal hero pass away. That’s perfectly human! But these tweets are so corny. A perfectly tasteful tribute would be a story about the celebrity’s impact on your life. Better yet, you could donate to a cause that your idol supported, such as these animal charities that Betty White championed throughout her life. As a person who loves creative writing and loves attention even more, I know for a fact that the authors of these tweets are manufacturing grief for likes and retweets, which is wildly disrespectful to these celebrities and their mourning friends and families. In the eternal words of Hillary Clinton’s social media intern, “Delete your account.”