CORPORATEMAXXING, TOLD WHILE SUCKING ON MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONIUS' SOUR ASS

Imagine being told all your life that if you want to make it big, you absolutely need to learn Latin. Yes, Latin.

You need to write it; you need to speak it; you need to be it. Imagine that, while sitting at a thrifted plastic table in a half-renovated kitchen dimly lit by a ceiling light-fan combo which hasn’t been dusted in who-knows-how-long because who has the time to clean that damn fan—imagine that while you’re coughing down dust-infused, microwave-shocked-to-life freezer peas (for the fifth time this month), your parents lecture you from the other side of that plastic table about the absolute, utmost importance that you don’t see your dwindling friend group tonight and study Latin instead.

You may look at them like they’re trying to revive Julius Caeser (or maybe he’s inhabited their corpses, and chosen to torture you personally), but you’re eleven years old. You can’t do much about it without being crucified. So you study Latin. You shut yourself in your room--one of two and a half bedrooms in your parents’ two-story condo (the half bedroom is a closet that your baby brother sleeps in while mumbling in half-Latin). You grow more distant from your friends, and when you meet up with them after your all-too-confusing chemistry class, you only understand half of what they’re saying. They appear to be developing a language of their own, complete with six or seven new slurs for the unnamed chemistry teacher.

You can’t follow. You’ve been too busy studying Latin, after all. And after one too many times telling them to do the same in a quite desperate attempt to at least have some legion around you, you notice their over-extended invitations have stopped. They don’t wait for you outside of chem class. They see you at lunch, but their language is so damn foreign... why the hell are we talking about toilets?

please. your friends need this

Whatever. They’ll fall off after high school. You’re on the pathway to success, the fabled road to Rome—you just have to get there. You double down in college, graduate with a strong enough portfolio, and even find some other people who speak Latin. They dress like you, in tan khakis and button-down shirts, the clothes of modern-day Rome. They like the same Latin phrases that you use. “Circle back; take this offline; Teams... and the biggest one: AI.)

They even use the same social media as you. LinkedIn. Together you’ve spent hours writing each others’ recommendations in Latin, commenting on CEO posts about dead squirrels and the meaning of teamwork, or how lucky they are to have time off when their sister is dying of cancer.

That’s right, you lame fuck. You’re a LinkedIn cuck.

The thing with Latin though, is that it died (and LinkedIn, though it’s not dying fast enough). Latin evolved, into at least six or seven other languages. And it’s still evolving.

You and your Latin-speaking friends, following in those footsteps of your proud parents, quickly net yourselves jobs out of college. The Latin/LinkedIn world loves how AI rolls off your tongue. They eat you up, and soon you’ve found yourself in a 9 to 5, in an office filled with people your parents’ age, or at least a sea of Latin-speaking Millennials. You all speak the same old language and come up with the same Latin ideas.

Meanwhile, two of your high school friends just launched their own clothing brand. The T-shirts say things like I EAT CEMENT, or E.

You don’t understand. You find them in a TikTok post shared in a LinkedIn article about the “ever-innovative” youth. You see that they have thousands of likes and reposts. You see them wearing gold chains. Fuck, why are they wearing gold chains?

Another friend tried learning Bitcoin. You never understood that language, but she seemed to well-enough to fund a MFA in, what, street art? She runs around tagging buildings with anti-Latin political commentary. And she’s having so much fun doing it.

Your parents say they’re proud of you. They’re struggling to pay their mortgage now. Your mom talks about retiring every time you visit and cook for them. She says she can’t wait. You hear the same thing in your coworkers, the ones who don’t bother to speak at all, not even in Latin. She’s looking thinner than usual, and more bloated. Her skin has been bruising more easily, you’ve noticed. One hospital bill—one written in exceptional Latin—would knock her to her knees.

You turn on the news with them and hear political figures address reporters in impeccable Latin. The reporters respond in the language of your friends, of the youth. They ask, Where’s the affordable housing? Why are groceries still so expensive? Where are the files, the ones that mark you a ____?

The figure, a true Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, responds. Quiet, piggy.

And through a spoonful of sweet pea casserole, you weep. You weep over choosing to speak their language over your own, that you never made a word for yourself, that your ideas grew soggy until your mind’s creative eye iced over.

Your salty tears taste like over-microwaved frozen peas.

Author’s note

While writing this, my editing software told me that “reposts” is not a word. I wrote this in an angry haze, thinking about how rarely I feel I can be my honest self around the older population that I regularly work with. I’ve found myself at a crossroads, feeling myself drift further from my Zoomer friends, debating whether a HE DAY FISH MAN sweater is worth my money if I can’t wear it on business casual days. Meanwhile, if I want respect from my online peers, I need as many SPAM shirts as I can get hold of. Is this the fabled duality of man? I don’t understand why the older crowd cares so much, unless they feel threatened. Let’s face it though. Their old ideas haven’t worked. They got us here, buried in debt in what feels like the biggest existential scam ever.

I’m sick of trying to earn respect from people selling their homes to billionaires.