Not F*cking Ready To Adult

INTRODUCTION

I ONCE TOLD AN EIGHT-YEAR-OLD TO GO FUCK HIMSELF

A few years ago now I told an eight-year-old to go fuck himself. That moment was unintentional and clearly unfortunate, but it would go on to help me haul myself from a malaise I had found myself in for a number of years. Like many of life’s significant events, I was worryingly unaware of its importance, as is the case with the majority of life-changing moments: applying for a job, meeting the person who goes on to be your significant other or even buying that leather jacket that remains, to this day, a real staple in your wardrobe. It was just another moment like all the others; in fact, minutes before, I was sitting backstage at yet another gig, readying myself to perform to a new group of strangers like I do every night of the week.

What was it then about that particular night that sticks so solidly in my psyche like an annoying bit of apple skin between teeth? The fact I swore in a child’s face certainly adds to the level of permanence afforded to that particular memory, but it’s not just the extreme embarrassment of the situation. Only last year I walked into a hotel room where a businessman was taking a shit, where I told him my full name and then left. Although that incident still haunts me today – and I’m assuming that businessman – it is this particular gig that always comes to me in my moments of solitude. In the shower, just before I go to bed, when I’m on a train with only a podcast and my own thoughts to keep me company. Boom! There it is. That little voice hidden in the depths of my mind pops in to quickly remind me of that evening.

‘Hello, Iain. Remember that time you told an eight-year-old to go fuck himself? You do? Oh good. Well, have a nice night.’

I certainly could have been in a better place, being recently single, technically speaking ‘out of work’ (though financially buoyant) and, most crucially, unfulfilled. That’s the big one. You ever felt like that? Even though on the face of it life is good – your work is tolerable, bordering on enjoyable, your social life is filled with interesting and entertaining friends, and your family are as supportive and loving as ever – for some reason there is that niggling feeling deep down in the depths of your soul that something’s not quite right, something’s missing. You feel like a selfish prick for even entertaining it; you have everything you’ve ever needed and so many people have made so many sacrifices so that you could have it, but ‘it’ isn’t enough and you can’t for the life of you work out why.

What the fuck even is ‘it’ and why can’t I just have ‘it’? ‘It’ is like The X Factor of life satisfaction, but none of us seem to have the Simon Cowell-esque ability to identify it correctly; it always seems to narrowly pass us by. There is nothing you can do to help identify it more clearly – literally nothing. I even spent a month with my shirt unbuttoned offensively low and my trousers pulled embarrassingly high. It didn’t help – I just got funny looks.

For years I was told by friends, family, school teachers, colleges and even social media that I was special and destined for great things. I’m fully aware that’s not unique to me, by the way. I’m sure you too have been awarded certificates at school and told how beautiful you are in Facebook comments, as we live in a world where praise is constantly heaped onto everyone. Despite this wall of positive encouragement, however, in the specific moment I swore at an eight-year-old, I just felt like another cog in the machine, another Starbucks-drinking, McDonald’s-munching face in the crowd.

To some of you this lack of fulfilment will resonate; to others, however, it will sound ungrateful, an odd note on which to start a book. I’m fully aware that many of you will be reading this on your holidays: you’ve found a sun lounger, bought your fruity cocktail, taken the obligatory photo of your legs with the ocean as their beautiful backdrop and posted it online with the sole intention of mocking your friends who are currently dragging their sorry asses into the office for another torturous Monday. You’ve then opened this book and thought, ‘Fuck me, this Love Island prick’s a bit down in the dumps.’ Fear ye not, my ITV2-loving amigos, for this book is about optimism and ‘living your best life’, as is famously said by tedious people on Twitter – and now me, apparently. Not to mention the story of me telling that eight-year-old to go fuck himself is in fact a bloody doozy – so there is plenty to look forward to!

WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?

Despite heavy reliance on my own personal experience – I mean, ‘myself’ is what I know best, the only thing I can truly call myself ‘an expert’ in – this book will not be an autobiographical romp through my life to date. I’ve not done enough stuff yet. You gotta think word count. I would really have to drag out that time I went caravanning with Pam and Bill in order to achieve anything other than pamphlet status. And no one wants to hear about that holiday. A boy called Craig chopped a wasp in half but otherwise it was largely uneventful.

Instead I’ll talk about my generation – millennials. They’ve got loads of stories. They’ll know loads of Craigs. Craigs who’ll have done things other than demonstrate serial-killer tendencies during a long weekend in Moffat. The millennial was born between roughly 1981 and 2002, basically (although not exclusively) old enough to remember what they were up to during 9/11 but too old to grasp the notion of watching young lads with mad fringes playing the computer game Minecraft on YouTube. It’s a generation famed – should the copious BuzzFeed articles be believed – for failing to grow up, never being able to properly ‘adult’.

That’s me, I’m like that, but why are we all perceived this way? If that’s also you then strap in. If it’s not then don’t you worry your non-millennial head. Most of the stuff I’m going to talk about here is universal and hopefully funny regardless of the digits you have etched onto your birth certificate. As well as talking about my generation, I will also talk to my generation, in a series of conversations with fellow millennials about their own personal journey through life, their hopes and fears, and the lessons they have learnt on their path to adulthood. A few of them have got well over a million followers on Instagram, so that will be bloody exciting.

I hope that through the process of researching and writing about my generation I will better understand how we work, and as a result better understand myself. Why was that night I swore at a child such a pivotal point in my personal development? Why does that precious ‘it’ always manage to slip me by no matter how much luck is thrown my way? And, believe me, luck is what we all have in abundance, even if it doesn’t always feel like it. You are lucky. You’re reading this book, which means you’re most likely from a first-world country, one of those that allows freedom of speech and has sufficient educational facilities to make literacy the norm, and you even have enough expendable income to be able to buy this in the first place – unless you’ve nicked it, of course. We’re bloody lucky and privileged and all the rest, yet sometimes it doesn’t feel enough. Why? What are we so scared of?

FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION

That night stays with me to this day for the simple reason that it was the first time in my short lifespan that one of my biggest fears became a reality – a fear all millennials share when it comes to life: the fear of doing it wrong. Fucking up. Becoming an adult is scary and easy to get wrong, so this fear of fucking it up hangs over us like a rain cloud hangs over a cartoon character having a bad day. University costs a fortune, reality-TV stars are millionaires by the age of 21 and everyone on social media seems to be smashing life (as well as avocados). So if you take a wrong turn at any point, well, why did you even bother? Success has changed from a marathon to a sprint and the starting line is very much over-capacity. You’d better make it to the finish and you’d better do it quick! I mean, who wants success in their fifties? You can’t even look good in the photos.

The really weird thing is that for years failure was seen as a necessary rite of passage to success. Like many of you reading this I can often find myself deep in a late-night YouTube hole. And when I’m properly stuck down there, one of my most common places of solace, after blackheads being popped and kittens performing on musical instruments, is the inspirational talk, normally a celebrity collecting an honorary degree with a rolled-up certificate in one hand, a funny hat on his or her head and some inspirational music in the background, which I do hope was added in after. I mean, surely even the most wet-behind-the-ears graduate would realise the ridiculous levels of self-importance attached to bringing your own Enya CD to a university speech. Anyway, the point is that during these talks failure is hyped up beyond belief, fetishised to the young people in the slightly less funny hats who look up in awe.

These stories begin in various ways: ‘I didn’t land my first proper acting job until I was 40,’ ‘I had several failed companies before making my millions aged 55,’ ‘I sawed my own arm off with a penknife.’ Yet despite the severity and diversity of the challenges our speakers have faced, they always end the same … ‘But look at me now.’ You don’t get much more adult than that! Standing in front of an audience being open and frank about all your failings but still managing to have achieved something special – now that is good-quality adulting.

Failure today, however, simply isn’t an option. You must succeed young, without any periods spent on the dole and ideally with all your limbs still attached. Failure to meet this new-found desire to succeed quickly leaves us in a constant state of flux, doubting our every decision. It still blows my mind when I’m watching some reality TV show and I see a 14-year-old being interviewed backstage saying something like ‘I’ve been working my whole life for this’ or ‘This is my one shot.’ I feel like grabbing them and screaming, ‘There’s no rush – when I was 14 I was sitting in a caravan watching someone chop a wasp in half!’

Despite the knowledge that time is on my side I have those moments of doubt every day; sometimes it’s a light murmur under the surface and other times it’s debilitating in its severity, but it’s always there. The feeling that I’m not good enough, I’ve not achieved enough, I’m not happy enough, that’s not good enough, they’re not good enough, I’m not thin enough, my photos don’t get liked enough, my job isn’t impressive enough, I don’t earn enough and so on. It will continue, I imagine, until death. Sweet, blissful death. And even then I’ll be thinking, ‘Oh Christ, I’ve only gone and died – this is embarrassing.’

As depressing as it may sound, these worries are necessary for our journey into adulthood. Without a fear of failure or a desire to achieve we would all just coast along, never really achieving anything. We’ve all got that mate who’s seemingly happy all the time. Who wants to be like them? They’re creepy – constantly smiling, never hungover, big fan of their boss, constantly eating ‘superfoods’. Get in the bin. I’d rather be in a Wetherspoons chatting to my equally hungover friend Karen about how Jim from accounts is a fucking prick, his eyes are too close together, I hate those ‘wacky ties he wears’ and ‘correctomundo’ isn’t an actual word, it’s a waste of oxygen.

Young people today seem to fail to realise how young they actually are. If you are under the age of 25 you have no fucking clue how many bites at the cherry you actually might have. Fuck up a bit. It’s really important. Fuck up. Hell, if you’re reading this on a bus, punch the person sitting next to you. You could go to jail for two years, get out and still be eligible for a young person’s railcard. You are so young. Yet despite this knowledge of our youth, a fear of failing is what seems to pin our generation down. Anyway, enough waffle, let’s get started. Here we go – an adult man who once feared failure, avoided it at all costs, will now retell each and every failure he’s ever had to you, the reader, so you can realise that maybe failure isn’t all that bad.

CHAPTER 1

BAD PARENTING

Mollycoddled

When you watch as much Love Island as I’m contractually required to do, you really do start to become enthralled by every single minute of it. Don’t get me wrong, there are downsides. I mean, essentially I am paid to sit in a small booth while a bunch of young people go into a villa and, well, fuck each other, and then I … watch. For ages. For too long, you might even say. That’s how I pay my mortgage. Worse still, my parents have seen to it that my overly supportive millennial upbringing didn’t end at the point I left home for London to become a stand-up – not a chance. My parents still keep every cutting, record every show and retweet every bit of praise I receive on their own custom-made Twitter accounts, or ‘Iain Shrines’ as they hate that I call them. My dad’s account is the very cleverly named MySonDoesJokes – give him a follow, he’d bloody love that. My sister is a bit angry about it, but MyDaughterDoesMediaManagement doesn’t quite have the same ring.

Having supportive parents is wonderful but somewhat annoying for me as an artist. I mean, all good art comes from pain – great artists have suffered and then told their stories to the world through their chosen medium. Thanks to Alison and Rodger being bloody saints means I’ve had none of that. I’m trying to write a book here, Mum and Dad, can you please give me something to work with? They haven’t even had a divorce, the selfish pricks! I’ve tried everything to get something out of them but they are simply too good.

‘Fuck you, Mum and Dad, I’m going to go be a comedian.’

‘Great! We can drive you to all your gigs.’

‘You are missing the point!’

The issue with my supportive parents – other than a lack of exposure to failure, the creation in my head of an imaginary safety net and an inflated sense of self-worth, all of which we will get round to talking about very soon – is the fact that when I say my parents watch everything, I do mean everything. Being the voice of Love Island and knowing that your parents watch is like being a kid watching a film with your parents when a raunchy sex scene would come on (my most vivid memory was the scene in Braveheart; at one point you see actual boobage – as a pre-teen I was in bits!) and you had that horrible moment of knowing that you and your parents were watching sex together, they knew they were watching sex with their child and the whole family would just sit in silence as Mel Gibson had his merry way with Catherine McCormack. Everyone would be transfixed by the screen, which by this time was absolutely covered in people having sex – it looked like the inside of an old phone box coated in those sex-line phone cards. The ones where you phone up and someone talks dirty down the phone to you – or so I’ve been told.

The entire evening would change from a chilled-out ‘movie night’ to a social time-bomb waiting to detonate in sexual congress and awkwardness, which would ultimately result in you praying for the sofa to gain sentience and gobble you up whole, or at least take you through to another room where neither your parents nor scenes of any sort of a sexual nature would be present.

Well, thanks to Love Island I get that feeling every day for an entire summer. And not only am I watching this with my parents, I’m actually talking them through the entire process. Just me giving my parents a step-by-step breakdown of the filth taking pace before their (and my) very eyes.

‘There you go, Father, that’s them off to the outside beds … Now what’s happening is that she has gone down there to perform what I believe is called a b –’

Sorry, I can’t. I just can’t. Anyway, you get the idea – the whole thing can be very grim. The thing I can be grateful for is that when it comes to Love Island my parents play a far more passive role in their viewing experience, because normally when it comes to the TV my parents enjoy something much more immersive. One Easter, I had a Saturday night off work, which for a stand-up comedian is very rare.

The upside of my job is that I’m my own boss and have days to myself to do as I please. In the majority of cases this will take the form of sitting in my pants playing FIFA, as this pleases me very much. However, the same can’t be said for the majority of the population, so as a stand-up comedian you have to work around everyone else’s social calendar. This means weekends and bank holidays are not a time to relax and socialise with friends, but instead mean going to theatres to entertain people who want to relax and socialise with theirs. Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of free time being a stand-up comedian, and people often say to me it must be amazing not working during the day – you can just do what you like. And, to be honest, the first few years are incredible. However, after a couple of years or so there are only so many empty pubs you can sit in, or 14-year-old French kids you can smash on FIFA before the solitude becomes all too much.

Anyway, the point is I had a very rare Saturday night off, so I decided to spend it training up to Edinburgh to surprise my mum and dad. On arrival I walked into our living room to see my parents watching the television, as is customary on a Saturday night; however, my folks were not sitting on the couch as would be customary. My parents were sitting in the middle of the living room, on office chairs, facing away from the television, just staring at the wall. I approached the two pensioners, my brain quickly trying to work out if I could afford to send them both into homes, and asked them what was going on, to which my mother proudly declared: ‘We’re watching The Voice and playing along at home.’