The Children Yearn for the Woods

The year is 2026. Your 9-5 job can’t even pay for a single McNugget due to inflation. The government is shut down due to all the geriatric white men going senile. Tiktok’s For You page is choked with AI storytimes and those male pregnancy mermaid videos. You are curled up in the fetal position in the 1x1 studio apartment that you pay $1,000,000 dollars a month to live in, crying, wishing that there was some escape. 

Luckily, there’s a solution! As one prestigious fuck once said, “I went to the woods because I wished to deliberately.” So, fuck it, we should all go back to the forest!

Society is so riddled with technology nowadays. What happened to children playing outside until the sun went down? Where are the PSAs for reminding parents that their children exist? Back when my dad was a kid, my grandparents gave him and my uncle a liter of gasoline and dirt bikes and told them to go nuts until sundown. Nowadays, if you ask kids to go outside, they treat it like they’re going to war. When I was a kid, if I was told to play outside, I put on my cat ears and got on all fours and pretended that I was a Warriors™ cat in Thunderclan™ amidst a battle to the death. If I am given the opportunity to be in Mother Nature’s heavenly and destructive brace, then you bet your ass I’m going outside.

You know what? It would be nice to go into the woods…IF WE WEREN’T ACTIVELY DESTROYING THEM! Seriously, do we need precious trees to be cut down just so the plot of land can become a sad parking lot? Do we need to destroy beautiful ecosystems so that another AI data center can be built for a frat guy named Kyle to use for his ENGL-100 essay? No! Honestly, we should just all go back to horse and buggy. It’s less convenient, but I would rather have literal horse shit on the sides of the road than these 16 lane highways that give me panic attacks even thinking about them. It’s better for the environment anyways.

Fuck society. Fuck AI. I want to go into the woods and spend the rest of my life among the trees and woodsy creatures. I want to build an elaborate treehouse with multiple stories. I want a huge bookshelf where I keep all my spells and other novels. I want a big ass cauldron.I want the local schoolchildren to tell stories about how if they go into the woods at night I would eat their toes or some shit. I want to dress up in whimsical dresses and live in an ivy-ridden plant infested rickety-ass home with a bajillion cats that are all somehow my familiars. I don’t want to work anymore. I just want to be an evil witch in the woods. Please just let me live my dream.