You did it!

You're free!

Free from classes and studying and shitty dorm food.

Free to travel and work and

worry about paying the bills and the crushing responsibility

of complete control over your own decisions and happiness

with no deadlines or milestones to look forward to until you get married or have kids

or get divorced or die.

Wait what ?!

Yeah, it's been two and a half months now since I've graduated.

I know a lot of you guys are graduating soon or just have

Congratulations, by the way.

Welcome to the fucking mess that is life after graduation.

I mentioned this quite frequently

I've kind of been going through and on and off

existential crisis ever since I graduated.

So,

I thought today, I would just compile all of those thoughts and, I don't know.

Maybe you guys can relate

I probably just like need a therapist but

eh, putting your thoughts out to millions of strangers on the Internet is just as good ...

right?

Okay, number one thing that struck me right after I graduated

is the complete lack of milestones.

The thing that always keeps me going and

keeps me working really hard is that milestone.

Whether it's graduation, whether it's summer break

There's always something to look forward to.

But once we graduate, what the fuck are the milestones anymore ?

You have marriage,

buying a house,

having kids

dying?

Call me a cynic,

but I honestly think that is why so many people rush to get married

or have babies, even if it's just because they want another thing to like celebrate

and then they can measure their life by their baby's milestones.

As you can tell, I would be a very nurturing and kind mother.

Like, a part of me just wishes that as an adult,

every four years you could have like another adult graduation

I get a cap and a gown and a dumb piece of paper that says

"Congratulations,

you made it four more years in your adult life !!!

Good job !! "

I guess the main way that I get joy in my life

is just working myself so hard that I am proud that I am exhausted and tired

and that's like a big part of my identity

But now that I'm not working towards a particular goal

and just my entire foreseeable future is me working my ass off

It's kind of .. it's a little bit harder to stay motivated

I'm gonna be completely honest

The weirdest thing of having graduated is having to shift your mindset from

being goal-oriented , like

Just wait until graduation, wait until this class is over ,

wait until somebody gives me an A or a gold star

to actually enjoying your everyday life

and like, being satisfied with yourself and the things that you do every day

which I've never been good at.

By the way, I'm gonna come off like incredibly privileged and annoying

in this entire thing

I know that having an existential crisis is a privilege

because I'm not worried about like putting food on the table

And if I was, then I would not be thinking about the fucking purpose of life

I'm gonna call this second section

" the wonderful crushing infinite possibility of life"

Do you ever stop and think about the fact that adults are just like bumbling around the world?

Nobody's telling them what to do, where they have to be

what job they have to take, what apartment they have to live in

Like anything, it is up to me.

It's weird !!!

Part of me

romanticizes like, what if I could just be a 50s housewife?

Nothing would be expected of me, other than to look pretty

to like to suburbgatory (? sorry I coudn't hear the word)

Not to say that that work isn't hard,

but like back in the day

My life would have been decided for me.

And now the pressure is on me to make the most of my life

That's terrifying but empowering at the same time

Thing number three that freaks me out about life is dating

Okay

Here is how I see dating

you have a deck of cards

Say, there's, there's ten cards

and they all have a different number on them

You don't know how high the numbers could go

they could go up to like 100 200

10 could be the highest number that you ever did

this represents how many people you're gonna date in your life

Although I think, statistically people have like two or three relationships before they get married

Which is a scarily low number

because

I'm on relationship number three

Okay, so you have this deck of cards / guys or gals

they're shuffled

So you've no idea what order they're gonna come up in

as you jate throughout your life

You just flip over one card at a time

But before moving on to the rest of the cards

you have to decide whether you're gonna keep that card or let it go

like at any given point

a relationship is just a bet

that this is good enough for me

And this is as good as it's gonna get

arbitrarily, you have no idea

you have no idea if there's somebody better out there

like part of me wishes that I could just

boo-boo-boo flip over all the cards in my deck and know

about what I have for the future

But that's not really how life works.

I don't know that's probably a flawed mentality because people aren't numbers

It depends on whether you grow together ,whether you really nurture that relationship or not

but you guys get what I'm saying, right ?

I guess rom-coms and Disney movies have taught me since I was really young

that love is this grand fateful thing.

But really, it's just kind of

swiping on a dating app on somebody I thought was cute

and now seven months later

we know each other really well

and we've come to deal with all of each other's bullshit

and like each other for who we are

so I guess that's ...

I don't know. Maybe that's fucking love

I wanted to talk about workaholism

I guess it's what we can call this section

throughout the week

all I really think about is looking forward to the weekend

and saying "you're gonna work so that you can get this break"

and then on the weekend, when I do have a break

all I can think about is feeling guilty that I'm not working

and I'm stuck in this cycle in my own brain of

constantly feeling like I should be doing something else

or looking forward to something

Everything, from my mom, when I was younger,

who everyday she'd

wake me up on the weekend and ask

" What are you doing that's productive today, Ashley ? "

to my teachers in high school,

who were all about getting good grades and getting into a good college

and now,

people who look at my YouTube numbers

and they're like, "oh my god, 1.6 Mil, congratulations.

You're so successful."

I guess my entire life

It's been burned into my brain that

success is what will make me happy

and success is what defines me

but when I look back at my life

the happiest times and the times I have felt most alive

were times when I wasn't working

I have this weird thing where, throughout the week

I honestly sometimes feel like I don't exist

sometimes, my entire week

I just spend alone with my camera, in my apartment, editing a video

sometimes I feel like I'm just

pixels on a screen

The times that I feel the most alive and that I feel the most real is like

that feeling of a summer night,

meeting somebody new,

or hanging out with your friends in high school

or being with somebody you love

You know those nights of your time almost stops

because you don't care if you're tired

and you don't care if it's like 5:00 a.m.

Because you're just like in the moment

That's what life is but we don't get enough of it

because we're all just like

"we have to work more to buy more things that we don't really want"

so we can feel some

superficial level of status and achievement

and pat ourselves on the back and say

" good job, you're working yourself to death, Ashley "

That brings me to the last section of this video,

which is memory

What's to call it

It weirds me out how badly I remember my own life

Like I couldn't tell you what I did last week,

what I felt last week,

how much I slept last week or what I ate

Poof.

Just another week gone by

I don't really remember it

It also weird me out that I've met so many people in my life

who will never meet each other

and I've been to many places

where the people I know haven't been

Nobody really knows, like, the whole Ashley.

That reminds me of this one quote from "Heart of darkness" that goes

" We live as we dream,

alone. "

I've always loved that quote because I feel like, life is like a dream

when you try to describe it to other people

and you know, I try to tell David about my hometown now

and it's like describing a dream to him

where in my mind, I can recall it vividly and I think it's so exciting,

but David's just there like, yeah, okay

like he's doing his best to envision it but he could never have lived through it

same thing for all the random adventures I've gone on

and all the feelings I've felt throughout my life

I guess they're really just mine

and sometimes that makes me feel really lonely

because I'm just this little like capsule of

feelings and memories that nobody else can understand

like recently, I met up with my ex for the first time

in like two years

It felt really really good because I didn't have a single photo of us together.

He never met any of my friends

so I almost felt like that wasn't real

It was this weird part of my life that only I could remember

Who we are, is made up of our past experiences

but our perception of our past experiences is made up of memory

and memory isn't even something that's real.

So I think,

Who the fuck are we?

I don't know

Life is just how you perceive it, I guess.

Okay. Well, that's, I guess, all I have for you guys

I hope that you guys relate to some of these thoughts

Well, maybe I don't hope because most of them were kind of depressing

I wanted to make this video because

sometimes I feel so frustrated with,

I guess the constraints of my job as like,

make a cute video with cute handwriting and cute aesthetics

and make a couple liberal jokes that people find really edgy

and sometimes, like that's not what's on my mind

what's on my mind is like, life is weird

I'll see you guys next week with.. with a much more normal video

Bye ~