Permanent Vacation is the name of an unintentionally hilarious hipster movie I got in my Netflix in a fit of boredom once. If you’ve never seen it, I highly recommend it; you get to see a scrawny, effeminate hipster go on a spasmodic “Bee-Bop” spree about 5 minutes in. He says he wants to “live fast and die young, like Charlie Parker,” slurred out in a manner that is begging for a beating.

It’s not exactly what I was expecting. I was hoping for something more akin to a slacker tale of motivation gone awry. What’s college except for a 4 year semi-permanent vacation? Why don’t more people realize this fact? Everyday of my life I see kids moaning and making their life hell for no reason whatsoever. I guess it’s understandable that when you’ve never had a job you will assign dire importance to your academic achievements, but come on, that’s no excuse.

I’m in my final few semesters taking entirely upper division courses. I am pulling A’s in all of them. I am doing this by extending the barest micron of effort; I study perhaps 30 minutes to an hour a day, and I rarely attend class. This is not because I am the smartest man on Earth; this is because everything has been so watered down and dumbed down in our universities that you have to be an inept mass of misfiring synapses to perform at anything below a B average.

It pains me to see so many people wasting their Permanent Vacation. This is the only time in your life you can roll out of bed at the crack of noon and drive to the grocery store still in your robe. Then with your student loan money you can buy a few pounds of chicken, some vegetables, and some juice.

Then you can go across the street to the liquor store and spend $40 on Maker’s Mark and Stoli.

You can spend your days in a hedonistic haze, going out to bars at 2 PM, watching TV on the couch for hours at a time. Do you people have any idea as to the breadth and quality of drink specials in the middle of the week? Life is an endless possibility, every day an adventure, your potential limited only by your final exam schedule and the prerequisite 48 hours of cramming prior to your bi-yearly Week of Reckoning. You’ll emerge unscathed…you always do.

Don’t waste this Permanent Vaction. You’ll be slaving away in corporate, white collar hell before you know it, with only the cold comfort of your two cars, mortgage, and nagging wife waiting for you. Think you’ll be invincible, grinning, tossing an icy bottle of Jäger into the freezer in the same shirt you’ve been wearing all week then?

What the people scoffing at me right now don’t realize is this: They will never be content. In high school they had to make the perfect SAT score and the perfect GPA to get into the perfect college. Now they’re doing the same thing, insert career-of-the-month standardized test, to get into the perfect grad school. Then they’re never going to be happy and content until they make partner at their Big Prestigious Firm or land that Dream Job in LA or NYC. Don’t get me wrong, it is important and healthy to have goals and ambition. Without them, you will never amount to anything; I’m just saying it’s OK to not need to always have the #1 spot. Be the best you can be, but if someone else gets that Important Thing you wanted…well, life is still going on. Might as well enjoy it.

I don’t know when the fuck it became fashionable or popular for people to have such massive insecurities, but it’s choking the life out of, well, life. People need to learn to be content with life around them, accept the perfect moments as they come, and kick back. Yeah, I’ll admit, maybe I can cling a little too tightly to my slacker’s paradise at times. I know it has to end someday though; I also know that I’ll find the next one just around the corner.