6) Stop playing fake sports. Lift weights, run, or man up like our Lord and Master and play a real sport which involves a risk of hurting yourself. Fake sports such as BMX tricks, skateboarding, Frisbee golf, rock-climbing on things which aren’t rocks, bungee jumping, and parkour are kid stuff. None of these are real sports, and any adult who does them should be ashamed of themselves for being an undisciplined bubblehead. Women: Stripper poles are for low-rent hookers, not responsible adults. Belly dancing is no excuse for being a fat narcissist. Learn real dancing which involves other people, or learn the ballet. Learn things which require the adult qualities of discipline, skill, and not looking like a sequined barnyard animal.

7) Make your peace with your family. You are not an atomic individual birthed in a test tube. Whatever your personal circumstances, you are a member of a family, a tribe, a nation, and a civilization. You owe your parents for putting up with you while you were a kid. Your parents are jerks, you say? Well, the apple probably didn’t fall far from the tree. Give them your filial respect for raising the next generation of jerks.

8) Stop being a passive lump waiting for something nice to happen to you. Escapism is something children do to avoid the hard facts of life over which they have no control. Unfortunately, modern adult children excel at escapism. How many chicken-hearted nerds complain that women won’t have anything to do with them, then go spank it to bukakke and play World of Nerdcraft all night long? How many aging party girls complain they can’t find a nice guy with whom to settle down and make a family, yet they go leaping from peen to scabby peen like a deranged bonobo looking for validation? If Nerdly McMasturbator wants a girlfriend, he needs to quit choking the chicken, eat some red meat, drink some whiskey, and go make out with a real, live girl. If Penny O’Dyingeggs wants a white picket fence and a passel of chilluns, she needs to have the gang’s PROPERTY OF tattoo removed from her hiney and marry a hardworking accountant who is a poor judge of character. Take risks and make decisions with consequences. You’ll be worm food soon, anyway. If you’re waiting for something which is just right or gives you magically delicious feelings, you will wait forever.

9) Make stuff. Making things is the penultimate human activity. Unlike pushing papers around or futzing with a spreadsheet, or whatever most people do for a living these days, when you make stuff, you can see and enjoy your work’s end product. It doesn’t matter what you make. Knit a sweater, write poems, build a deck, cook dinner, start a business, or make little doilies or ashtrays which look like Karl Malden’s nose—just make something. Even savages with bones in their noses make things.

10) Stop living life according to your whims and passions. The ancient Greeks, fathers of Western Civilization, had a word for such people: slaves. Nature’s slaves are people who can’t govern their passions well enough to think about the future. If your every decision is guided by whim or feelings, you are an animated meat puppet controlled by manipulative advertisers and what you had for dinner last night. Adults make choices based on reason and foresight. Decadent children do whatever they feel like. While I’m at it: Stop wallowing in your emotional narcissism. Your emotional life is not important or interesting to anyone. It is almost certainly trite and disgusting.

11) Do something nice for others once in a while, you selfish git. Donate your time and money to a good cause. Assist someone worthy who is down on their luck. Be helpful and kind to your significant other rather than complaining about them. Clean up, cook dinner, or buy a round of beers; do something selfless once in a while. Show people the common decencies even if you feel grouchy. Don’t do these things to show off, and don’t do them for the undeserving. Do them because you’re an adult human being capable of empathy for others. Selfishness is adolescent.

12) No texting.