You want to stay.
After all this, after the whole goddamn, beautiful, ugly circus, you want to stay here and have “ties” with your grandkids. You have this picture in your head, don’t you? A quiet, respectable, and completely fraudulent little painting. You, a gentle old man with a kind, wise smile, sitting under a lemon tree, while the little ones, your blood, your legacy, they giggle and play at your feet.
What a load of horseshit.
Let’s do the math, you and I. Not the clean, corporate, project-manager bullshit. The real, back-of-the-napkin, 3-a.m.-whiskey kind of math.
In the 1960s, when your grandfather was a man, the average house cost about sixty grand in today’s money. And the average salary was about sixty grand. A one-to-one ratio. A beautiful, simple, and completely honest piece of arithmetic. A man could work a job, a real one, and at the end of the day, he could own a piece of the goddamn world.
And now? It’s 2025. The average house is six hundred thousand dollars. The average salary is a quiet, pathetic, and completely insulting sixty grand. That’s not a ratio; that’s a goddamn joke. And the average American, the poor, dumb bastard who’s still trying to play by the old rules, he has less than a thousand dollars in the bank. The pensions, those beautiful, honest promises of a quiet, respectable end, they’re gone. The Baby Boomers, in their infinite, selfish wisdom, they ate the whole goddamn seed corn and left you with the cobs.
And the values. Christ, the values. The traditional ones, the ones that held the whole rotten, beautiful, fucked-up thing together, they’ve been turned into a goddamn cafeteria line. You’ve decided you can just pick and choose. “Oh, I’ll take a little bit of the ‘family is important’,” you say, “but I’ll pass on the ‘staying married to one person your whole goddamn life’.” “I’ll have a side of ‘respect your elders’,” you tell yourself, “but hold the ‘personal responsibility’.”
You don’t understand, you poor, dumb bastard. It wasn’t a cafeteria. It was a machine. A beautiful, ugly, and completely interconnected piece of machinery. You can’t just take out the gears you don’t like and expect the whole goddamn thing to keep running. The divorce, the single parenting, the multiple partners… those aren’t just “lifestyle choices.” They’re the sound of the engine seizing up.
And you, you want to sit under a lemon tree and have your grandkids giggle at your feet?
You’re a renter. You don’t have a goddamn tree.
Let me tell you the new, ugly, and completely honest rule of the game. If you don’t have a million dollars in the bank by the time you’re sixty, you are not going to make it. You are not a grandfather; you are a liability. You are a burden. You are a quiet, respectable, and completely inconvenient line item in the budget of your children’s lives. You are a secondary character, a bit player in their own beautiful, ugly, and completely fucked-up movie, because you were too scared, or too stupid, or just too goddamn broken to live a primary life yourself.
The rent payment, the car payment, the quiet, steady, and completely relentless hemorrhage of a life lived on credit… you can’t pay for that without a job. Forty hours a week, and then some, just to keep your head above the goddamn water. And what does that leave you? A few tired hours on a Saturday afternoon to mow a lawn you don’t own.
And you think the lemon tree is just going to happen?
No. The lemon tree can’t grow because the goddamn soil is poisoned. You poisoned it, with your beautiful, convenient, and completely soul-crushing cafeteria of values. And the government, the corporations, the whole beautiful, ugly, and completely indifferent machine, they’re right there with you, pissing in the same hole. They’ve set up a game you can’t win, and you’re still trying to play by the rules. You’re a good, quiet, and completely respectable hamster on a wheel, and you’re telling yourself that if you just run a little faster, you’ll finally get somewhere.
There is no win-win in this scenario. There is no quiet, respectable retirement. There is no goddamn lemon tree.
There is just you, an old, tired, and completely broke man, standing in the middle of a desert you helped create, wondering why the hell nothing will grow.
And that, my friend, is a beautiful, ugly, and completely honest tragedy. The kind they don’t write songs about anymore.
