The Uncanny Valley of Adulthood

There's a particular flavour of disorientation that hits you the moment the structured education system finally spits you out. For years, you're on rails. You do your GCSEs, you go to college, you hand in your final assignments, and there's always a predetermined Next Step waiting for you.

And then, suddenly, there isn't.

I just finished college, and I'm feeling profoundly, viscerally aimless. The rails have abruptly stopped, and I'm just standing here in the dark, faffing around, trying to figure out what I'm actually supposed to do with my life now. Everything feels... meaningless.

Echoes of Reality

You know the liminal space memes, right? The Backrooms. Specifically, Kane Parsons' canon of it. In that lore, the titular liminal space of infinity creates what seems to be echoes of reality. It tries to recreate the real world – an office, a hallway, a suburban house – but it ultimately gets it slightly wrong. It's stuck in the uncanny valley.

That is exactly what this post-college phase feels like. I am trying to recreate the motions of being a functioning adult, but I'm getting it slightly wrong, and the result is just uncanny.

Am I doing these job applications correctly? I haven't the faintest idea. How are you actually meant to do this? How are you meant to adult when the rulebook seems to have been written for a completely different reality?

The Bootstraps Paradox

Adding an entirely new layer of absurdity to this charade is the physical reality of my current situation. Less than two months ago, I had brain surgery. By all medical and logical definitions, I am still in the thick of recovery.

But you can't actually recover when the looming spectre of adulthood is breathing down your neck, demanding you immediately secure an income. I am supposed to be resting a healing brain; instead, I am stressing over cover letters.

The prevailing societal wisdom right now is that I need to "pull myself up by the bootstraps." It is an entirely ironic phrase to throw at a situation like this. Originally, the idiom was coined to describe a task that was physically, laughably impossible – a literal physics joke about trying to levitate by yanking upward on your own footwear. Now, without a hint of irony, it is weaponised as earnest life advice.

The Corporate Uncanny

Then there is the performative nightmare of the job hunt itself.

My actual, tangible portfolio is sitting right there on my GitHub . The code and the projects speak for themselves. Yet, I find myself constantly worrying about how my personal website will hold up under the scrutiny of prospective employers. The thing is, that website exists just for me. It is a space for me to simply be myself.

I deeply resent the expectation that I have to sanitise my online presence, to essentially lie and sell some polished, corporate-compatible pastiche of myself just so I can earn the right to live my life. It's ridiculous, and quite frankly, it is liminal in its own way. You are forced to construct a hollow, alternate-reality version of your own identity – like building a sterile, fluorescent-lit office over your actual personality – just to play the game.

To Simply Exist

If I am entirely honest, I have zero hope for the future right now. We all fade over time, and this entire process has made me acutely aware of how fleeting it all is. I do not want to live in a reality where we are forced to monetise every waking breath.

I just want to exist. I just want to be.

I don’t want to waste a massive chunk of my life stuck staring at a computer screen, even more so than I already do, grinding away for a system that couldn't care less about me. I want to be out in a forest somewhere. Give me a quiet cottage. Let me write poetry in my spare time, tending to my own basic needs without having to carry the crushing, perpetual worry about the state of the world on my shoulders.

Surviving the Flesh

Maybe that’s why I keep doing this. Why I keep updating this specific corner of the internet, even when everything else feels stagnant and hollow.

I write so that I am not forgotten.

In a world that demands you turn yourself into a commodity, writing becomes an act of quiet defiance. It’s a way to anchor my mind when my body is struggling to heal, and a way to make sure that whatever happens, something real remains. I write so that I can survive the death of the flesh and live on in prose. Even if the current reality is an endless loop of unread CVs, these words are a proof of life that no automation can delete.

The 1,000-to-1 Odds

Instead, I am trapped in this loop. Everyone—and I mean everyone—keeps dispensing the exact same tired script:

Keep going.

Keep networking.

Keep doing all that.

But for what, exactly? We're currently navigating a market where you have to throw a thousand tailored applications at a wall just to receive one automated rejection email from a no-reply address. No one has replied to my applications. I send them out into the void, and the void doesn't even have the courtesy to echo back.

How long is this supposed to be the status quo? Months? Years? You're meant to just keep firing your CV into the abyss until something eventually gives, but the abyss is remarkably resilient.

Temporal Liminality

Then there's the time aspect. I'm almost twenty-one, which means I'm technically barely into my twenties, yet I already feel like they're slipping out of my hands.

There is this bizarre temporal drift happening. Everything is moving entirely too fast – weeks blurring together, another month gone – and simultaneously far too slow. I wake up, check an inbox devoid of replies, try to ignore the fact that my body desperately needs rest, dream of a quiet life in the woods, and stare at the ceiling.

It's disorienting. I feel like I'm stuck in a temporal liminality. A waiting room where the clock on the wall is ticking at double speed, but the hands never actually move forward.

This isn't one of those posts where I offer a neat solution or a script that automates the problem away. This is just one of those posts where I document where I'm stuck, because sometimes you just need to rant into the void about why simple things are never actually simple. Right now, I'm just wandering the backrooms of early adulthood, hoping I eventually clip back into reality.