Depressingly true to life.

The only jobs available are low-paying, demeaning, menial jobs, and require long hours just to afford enough basic necessities to keep yourself presentable enough to appear at work the next day. Everything that might be fun to do is closed by the time you get off work. Every possible opportunity to better yourself through education and exercise is also closed by the time your day job is done. The only things still open are the most banal of entertainments--your choice of empty, vapid pabulum on a screen, or dancing and drugs, to take your mind away from the daily grind. Both of which only increase your "sociability" stat, which is useless for actually getting a better job. The jobs that require "sociability" are already taken by the pants-on-head moron who was in the same fraternity as the boss's clueless kid, and helped hold his hair back a couple times.

Even if the university, library, etc. were open into the night, there just aren't enough hours in the day to actually go to them. Once you've gotten enough sleep, eaten enough to survive, and worked enough to eat, that's it. The day is over. If you want to get more than that out of life, you have to start sacrificing necessities.

Soon you're showing up to work with less than 20% food, 20% sleep, and 20% hygiene, but no one cares; you're just another faceless drone who can't magically make the coffee machine spit out coffee any faster, nor figure out how to spell "Lundyynn" on the first try.

You scrimp. You save. You invest in your "garden" at home in hopes of generating some extra income selling "cabbage" out behind the convenience store. Somehow, through incredible effort, enduring sleepless nights, near-starvation, and bad personal hygiene, you save up enough to go to the university part-time. Finally, you think. This is the way out of this hole.

But as bad as the food-sleep-hygiene situation was before, it's even worse now. Power nap and power bar before work, and once again before class. Lather, rinse, repeat. Sleeping at night, the whole night? Eating full meals? What kind of madness is that?

But somehow, you do it. Bleary-eyed, gaunt with malnutrition, smelling faintly of sour dairy creamer and BO, you leave the university, flimsy paper diploma clutched tightly in one hoof. This is it. It's all been worth it, surely.

You check all the businesses in town, flinging job applications left and right. "Not experienced enough." "Nah, we'd rather hire someone from my son's fraternity again." "No, I think we're going to hire some guy who's 8 years from retirement age to fill 2 entry-level positions, instead." "What kind of degree even is this?"

In desperation, you return to the coffee shop and beg for your old job back. "Sorry, you're overqualified now. We can't possibly hire you, it's against corporate policy."

It's about then that your food, sleep, and hygiene meters all reach zero at the same time. You can't do anything. If you can even bring yourself to get out of bed, you just end up standing outside buildings, trying to will yourself to go in, to apply for a job, to just go see a movie again, even to just buy a meal. But you can't. You just can't. "Pony cannot do that because: unhappy."

It's then that you collapse in the street, broken, penniless, and alone; unable to die, yet unable to live.

GOTY 10/10