We’re told from a very young age that life has a very clear linear progression. You go to school. You go to uni. You get a career. You get better at that career and you get paid more and you buy progressively bigger houses and bigger cars. All you have to do is knuckle down and, eventually, you will get to retire in luxury – wandering around your massive house while you daydream about birdwatching. What we’re not told, however, is that life is short, death is eternal, and that sooner than you think, you will find yourself lying in a hospital bed wishing that you had spent more time drinking beers at the beach with your friends instead of staring at spreadsheets.
There’s still hope, though. Well, I mean, you’re still going to die and then have your consciousness wink out of existence like it was never even there, there’s no hope with that. But there is still hope for salvaging the rest of your life. You can give it all up and become a complete deadshit.
Society doesn’t have a lot of respect for the humble deadshit. Although we respect and even applaud hedonism when it’s done by wealthy celebs, we view a life lived solely for pleasure as distasteful and tacky when it’s done by someone who never wears a shirt and spends nearly every day drinking beer watching either Bloodsport or movies that come up when you search Google for ‘movies similar to Bloodsport‘. But what else is life for if not to do the things that make you happy? Helping people?? That sounds like a lot of work.
Taking up the life of the deadshit requires a few adjustments and a few sacrifices, but the results are so worth it. Allow me to guide you through this process.
Finances
This is the big one. If it was financially viable to not work and to just do whatever we wanted, none of us would ever turn to work (except for some deeply strange people who I imagine spend a lot of time on LinkedIn). The key to the deadshit lifestyle is not working much.
We take it as a given that both our income and our cost of living will increase more or less in tandem as we get older, but that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. If you’re willing to let your standard of living stay where it is, you’ll find that you have to work fewer hours to maintain your current lifestyle. I dropped down to three days a week and I’m still living more comfortably than I was when I was working full-time at uni age.
One of those people from the newspaper articles about how ‘This 23-Year-Old Owns Seven Houses & All It Took Was Being Born Into A Rich Family’ would be telling you that this doesn’t allow you to accumulate any capital and you’re basically putting yourself on a financial treadmill *but* what you have to keep in mind is that life is meaningless and, again, soon you will be dead. Having lots of stuff is cool, but what’s even cooler is having 4-day weekends every week and not ever having to set an alarm.
Cuisine
There’s not a lot of room for fine dining on the deadshit budget. Hell, there’s not a lot of room for regular dining. The trick to balancing the deadshit diet is that eating whatever you want should be embraced as part of the hedonistic lifestyle you’ve adopted, but also you need money to live. The key to this is making sure that the money you spend on food when you’re not eating out or ordering in goes a long, long way.
For this, you need to pull out the skills you developed at uni. Eat a lot of Mi Goreng, but go crazy with it. Add shit to it. Turn it into a soup, mix it in with a stir-fry. Anything to liven up the fact that you will probably be eating a lot of this stuff. Sandwiches are cheap as shit and you can spice those up any old how. Make huge meals and freeze them. In winter, get crazy into soups. Soups kick ass and they’re so cheap.
Buy stuff in bulk from wholesale places, you can get huge quantities of spices and dried foods for the price you would pay for tiny portions of them at supermarkets and always having them on hand means you’re never very far away from making a dope meal. I get by mostly by once a week buying bulk veg from the bargains table at a fruit and veg stall at the local markets and then turning most nights into a Masterchef-style challenge to assemble something out of the random shit I bought.
This might sound slightly more frugal than an ideal life, but penny-pinching here allows you to splash out in the ways that really matter: beer and burritos – both hugely crucial to the deadshit lifestyle. Drinking lots of cheap beer and enjoying a variety of different junk foods and snacks is, at the end of the day, what it’s all about.
The Arts
Now that the boring practical shit is out of the way, it’s time to get into the heart of being a deadshit: wizards. You are going to consume a lot of media about wizards. Books about wizards. Music about wizards. Movies about wizards. If you’re living the deadshit lifestyle correctly, your life will very heavily feature wizards.
You’re going to want to start with the music, specifically doom metal and stoner metal, the official genres of the deadshit. You’ll note that some of these recommendations don’t literally feature wizards, but they are, on a spiritual level, songs about wizards. You’re going to start with the seminal single-track stoner album Dopesmoker by Sleep. From there you’re going to go to Electric Wizard‘s 2000 album Dopethrone. Next, you’ll want to move into the more Barbarian-focused territory of Conan‘s Monnos. After that, the world is your oyster: Acid King, Telekinetic Yeti, OM, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard – basically anything with cover art that looks like it should be airbrushed on the side of a van.
Movies-wise you can look no further than the deep trove of insane and often terrible 1980s sword-and-sorcery movies. You’ve maybe seen Schwarzenegger‘s Conan the Barbarian, and possibly even the much worse but for that reason much better sequel, Conan the Destroyer, but with all that spare time you have, you’re going to be digging a lot deeper. 1983’s Krull, Conquest and Thor the Conqueror. Sorceress, The Archer and the Sorceress, The Warrior and the Sorceress, The Sword and the Sorcerer (yes, some of these names kind of blend together). Anything that fits these naming conventions is bound to be a good time. Does giving up on career progression mean you absolutely must watch weird Italian-American co-productions of low budget fantasy movies? Yes, absolutely. No, I cannot tell you why.
I’m sure it must seem like the subtext here is that once you become a deadshit, you’re going to be high a lot of the time, so let me clear that up: yes.
Fashion
In a nutshell: you are going to be doing a lot of op-shopping. On the rare days that you do wear a shirt, there’s a very high chance it’s going to be one that you got for $3 that someone else before you got for $40 while on a holiday somewhere before realising that they are never, ever going to wear it.
You’ll find that your look tends towards practical, easy-wearing clothes. Shorts that allow for ease of movement when you relax on the couch and that catch a lot of sun when you’re drinking in the backyard on the banana lounge you got for a steal at the tip shop. Shirts that don’t easily show burrito-related stains. Shoes that are easy to kick on and kick off (thongs – you’re going to be wearing a lot of thongs). You are going to learn to love and appreciate both the cheap flanno and the sales that you buy them at from Target, Big W and Kmart just before winter.
Health
The deadshit lifestyle isn’t entirely about sitting inside ripping bongs and watching dubbed Italian bodybuilders fight skeletons (it is mostly that, though) – if you wanted to spend your life cooped up, you may as well have stayed in your office job. This is your chance to get out and enjoy the outdoors properly: go to the beach as often as you can, find waterholes in the national parks closest to you, even just go sit in the park near your place and read your book (ideally the book is about wizards).
Exercise is usually a pain in the ass because it’s something we have to do outside of our routine to maintain our bodies like they are some sort of Tamagotchi, but it’s easy as if you just make it a part of what you were doing anyway. Going to smash a few tinnies? Why not smash a few tinnies on top of a mountain that was a bit of a hike to get to? If you’re going to listen to Dopesmoker for the 50th time that month, why not do it while going for a walk along the river? Piece of piss.
This might sound too good to be true, but I urge you to keep the deadshit option in mind the next time you feel like decapitating someone because you received a passive aggressive email about meeting-room-booking etiquette.
