Final Satire: "Fifty Shades of Success"

                A deluge of somewhat-acidic rain pounds against the glass windows of his apartment, on the forty-second floor on the cheap side of town. Max, distracted as usual, glanced between this natural normality, the glass of whisky in one hand, and his copy of Thoreau's Life Without Principle in the other. The only thing thumping harder than the rain against his window is his tell tale heart. His mind is bombarded to the point of the most unbearable of headaches with questions that hurt too much to answer.
                The year is 2025. Max is a middle-aged man with no family whatsoever. The closest thing he has to friends are the haunting reminisces of figures in his past life, phantoms that could have meant something to him, but didn't. Like Ebenezer Scrooge, his dead father stands beside him, scolding his inability to finish a single sentence of the book.

"How dare you consume such a poison to your precious mind!"

"Would you rather a seven percent solution?"

"How do you expect to get anywhere in life defying those that have authority over you?"

"Get where? To a higher degree of education? To a more lucrative career? To some greater extent of success?"

                Max is still in denial about losing his job after his first case as a lawyer.

"You have failed young man!"

"With what? What went wrong with anything I did, papa? I am perfect in every objective way with every decision I've ever made!"

                In a fit of despair, he falls over in his chair, hitting his head on the tile floor, and falls into a hazy reminiscence of his youth.

                Falling through the rabbit hole, he wakes up to go to his first day of kindergarten. He recreates this day and more throughout his jovial youth, in which the world seems so quaint and peaceful. He befriends his neighbor, Min, with whom he walks to school. On the way home one day, they stop at Min's house to play hide and seek in the backyard. When Max's parents see this from the windowsill, they ask each other about the educational value this has. They want their child to spend his time learning and getting ahead of his classmates in every way possible. So, his father goes out to get him back inside to practice his multiplication tables.

                Min later on brings the topic up at dinner, asking his parents why Max needs to study all the time. Min's parents laugh at the notion that kindergarteners should spend their free time studying. They then tell the boy to go outside and interact with the world in his free time, only studying when it truly seems necessary.

                When the test on multiplication comes around, Max gets a perfect score, while Min only gets a "C." This pattern repeats itself again and again. Throughout grammar and middle school, Max would learn what he needs to in school, study when he got home, and then do well in school as a result. He spent hours working, and when he was done, literally didn't know what to do. He developed no interests; had no games, toys, or other entertaining possessions, and thought hobbies were silly and useless. However, his father was proud.

                He ends up staring at his ceiling, thinking, doing nothing at all, for hours on end. It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. He just looks at the patterns in the ceiling tiles. They had a swirling curviness to them, colored black juxtaposed on the white background of the tiles. They would fold around and make shapes and patterns in his mind. He envisions whatever he learned about in school that day on the ceiling at night, as he knew nothing else to envision. One day it would be a patricianary king, overthrown by the meager and ignorant masses, after learning about the French Revolution. Another, after reading Animal Farm in English, simplistic animals put in their place by the justly greater pigs, pigs who were objectively more valuable to the community because of how smart, productive, and hard working they appear to be to Max.

                In high school, he gets a perfect GPA every quarter. He develops a certain degree of arrogance and intolerance for others who don't attain A's in every class. However, whenever approached in conversation, he responds incoherently and incompetently as he's completely devolved from his former self into introversion. Whenever Min sees him, he attempts to strike up a conversation, only to be eluded by Max's aversion to talking to anyone. Min has a much rougher time than Max in high school. He has perfect standardized test scores, but can't bring himself to enjoy school or hold any ambition whatsoever. Max, just as he can't talk to others, can't talk in speeches either, nor anything requiring interaction, resulting in him taking on group projects by himself, allowing group members no roles in the group at all.

                These antisocial tendencies further his problem with free time, as he's compelled to enjoy nothing, but still has time to do things after all his homework's done. He feels depressed, as others that seemed obviously well-liked don't try as hard as him in school, as others love one another, but he doesn't do anything about it his own inabilities. He instead holds onto the belief that postponing anything errant from the path to success would make everything better and worth it in the end. His parents constantly reaffirm this and force it down greater whenever the topic came up. His life was about his parent's expectations.

                Voices creep into his head, voices of philosophers and scholars, voices of heroes and madmen, or anyone that might have some personality from history class. They affirm this sense of intellectual entitlement he fills himself with on a day to day basis, one that asserts a correlation between success in school and utility to the world. He believes that he's like a god among mortals, impeccable and flawless. But yet, unceasing misery fills him at all waking moments.
                This overflowing jar of despair is only purged to be replaced with anger following the beginning of college. He's now a major in pre-law at Cornell. Being as introverted as he was, he has difficulty attaching himself to his roommate, Mark. This detachment turned to unfriendly hate as the weeks went on. Mark is a sociable pot-smoking free-thinker, who loved to talk and discus and debate and relate. Because of this degree of openness and relatability, he quickly becomes the most popular person on the floor. Max couldn't be more opposite in every way.

                Max gets A's in every class. Mark gets B's in every class. Max detests waking up in the morning, spending his day with self-proclaimed idiots, and falling asleep without saying a word to anyone around him. Mark loves every second of his life, doing as much as possible as often as possible. He spends his days hiking, walking, reading, writing, learning, discovering, talking, and feeling, all while high and with those around the floor to whom he had grown attached. Max starts spending time talking to himself, replacing the voices of others in his head with his own, driving himself through the misery with words of reaffirmation, paving the path to hell in virtuous intentions.

"Almost there Max; it'll all be worth it in the end."

"You've still got some studying that can be done; don't stop now."

                Max was at perpetual war with himself.

                Mark, at the end of the year, decides to switch to being an English and Political Science duel major, rather pre law. Max scoffs at this, with the generic liberal arts critiques of applicability and career-orientation. Mark's last words to Max that school year are:

"Max, if you knew how the world works, you'd be a bored billionaire by now. You see education as a means to a fiscal end. I truly feel bad for you, for feeling like all these 4 years are just to get a better job."

                Max is driven insane. Sophistry peaks in his own mental defense and defamation of this logic. Throughout all of summer, he sits in his room staring at the swirling lines and squiggly patterns in the ceiling, utterly depressed in his apparent omniscience. His father was proud.

                Years later, after graduating Columbia's law school, he went to rent an apartment downtown. The landlord was, of all people, Min. A brief conversation, one wherein Max sat dumbfounded and noncontributing, revealed that after dropping out, Min pursued a business degree on his own at a New York community college, and through networking, connections, and an unmatched degree of social skills, worked his way to a 6 figure paycheck by the age of 25. Max made less as a Columbia lawyer.

                This broken man awakes from his drunken slumber on the floor, crawling his way to the bedroom to snooze once more. The revisiting of his youth continues with his first court case.

                He is hired after searching for a job for months, failing nearly every interview, for a firm in New York. Being the polluted scumbucket of a futuristic city it is, he now represents, in his first case, a company who polluted a near river to the point of nearly killing individuals in a nearby town who used the river. Upon walking into the courtroom, dementia takes his mind to a new extent of disillusionment. The judge, in said case, is the former roommate, Mark. After the first day of trial, in which Max stumbled on his own words innumerably, Mark, like the former neighbor, has a brief conversation about life after college. Mark has a wife, kids, friends from and after college, and an unrelenting love for everything and everyone around him. Max is broken inside.

                The first night after this, Max doesn't sleep a moment. He stares and stares, leering with no movement whatsoever. Teachers and various influences in his life appear around him, barely visible due to his unmoving eyes. All throughout the night, he hears words of admirance, with the sole purpose of making him feel haughty and proud, but actually making him devoid of all feeling. Consumed by apathy, he waits for the night to end. Then, finally, his father arrives, telling him to not socialize with this evil pot-smoking failure of a judge.

                The next night, his mind cries for peace and sanctuary. He continues with his inability to sleep and his frequency of hallucinating. His school-yard chums come up to his bedside admiring his grades on tests and such, asking how and or why he has worked so hard. The only response he could think of was "to do better", but in his mind, he felt it should have been "to be better." The neighbor of his youth comes up to him, asking why he is so antisocial:

"Because people get in the way of my studies."

"Because I want to finish my homework rather mindlessly mingle with peasants such as yourself."

"Because I don't need friends to be happy."

                His college-aged former roommate appears, repeating those same old words of yesteryear:

"Max, if you knew how the world works, you'd be a bored billionaire by now. You see education as a means to a fiscal end. I truly feel bad for you, for feeling like all these 4 years are just to get a better job. I truly feel bad for you, for feeling like all these 4 years are just to get a better job. Get a better job. Better job. Better job. Better job. Better job. Better job. Better job. Better job. Better job. Better job."

                On the last night, 66 hours into this sleeplessness, he sits up, staring out the window. He feels awakened from this harsh dream because he sees the same picture as that horrible night, sitting up on the same bed in the same room out at the same hopeless night. But there's someone there: himself. This doppelganger initiates a dialogue:

"Staring off into the starless desolately bleak city once more; oh how enlightened you are now."

"Like you're any better, you pathetic excuse for a ghost."

"Tell me, are you a success?"

"Did you always choose good over bad?"

"Don't mock me, me; I'm a Columbia lawyer at the top of the food chain. I've done more for society and produced more in my life than any of those wastes of oxygen from high school, college, or the trial. Everyone wishes they could be more like me!"

"Oh, so I'm assuming you've drawn this conclusion because Mark said how much he aspires to be like you, or your old neighbor, right?"

"They waste their lives not taking the greatest possible advantage of their abilities. Everyone should always try their hardest on everything they do if they truly love the world and want to give back to it, as Cicero once said."
"But what did Cicero say about love, friendship, and happiness?  He said how friendship is essential to any civilized human, and that one can only be as happy as he makes others. Have you succeeded in doing that, making people happy, making yourself happy?"

                With that, the window shatters outwards of this forty-second floor apartment. His final thought is a query to a boy below on whether or not it's Christmas.