I spent my 20s in college and LAN parties. Try them... it's a blast!

As someone who did live like image 1 in late 20s and early 30s, it sucks so much when you have to go back to image 2.

Maybe better not to experience it at all.

It's not too late to change your ways.

If the characters hadn't spent practically every night drinking until 2AM, HIMYM could have been compressed into a movie with a shitty ending instead of 9 seasons with a shitty ending.

I'll take watching TV over drinking anytime. And I hate watching TV.

A buddy and me were the first in our circle to get an apartment after college, so we became the meeting place. It wasn't a party house, we drank beer, and smoked weed, but it was calm and quiet, and the old folks below us never complained. They were frequent visitors, as a matter of fact.

People would start showing up around 8. My buddy and I managed different record stores, and we were into all sorts of music, and we had ALL the latest promo recordings, so usually we had a ball game on the TV with no sound (for our buddy Mark, who loved sports), while we listened to music, smoked, and talked. There were usually a dozen people, guys and girls, all ages, right up to old folks downstairs, sometimes. He'd had a stroke, and he could understand everything, but couldn't converse, beyond random curse words, which he would deliver with either exasperation or disbelief, which we all thought was hilarious, and so did he and his wife.

At 11:30, we'd watch Johnny Carson's monologue on the TV, and at midnight wed switch it over to two episodes of Twilight Zone. After that, everybody went home.

That was our ritual about 3-4 nights a week for a couple of years, until everybody started to scatter as they found jobs in different places. We'd go out now and then, but only because we weren't going to meet any new girls hanging around our apartment. Going out often meant moving the party to someone else's place for the night.

We couldn't afford to go out to party much, but we always had a better time at home with our friends, especially since there were no threats of judgemental parents, RAs, etc. Our first real taste of true adult freedom was sweet enough to keep us happy.

You had a nice house and TV in your 20s.

Between rent, school loan, car payments and groceries I was pretty much tapped out. Pulling 60hr weeks I didn't have social time even if I wanted to.

20 years later I never made new friends but at least I'm working a normal 40hrs. Still paying all the same bills and still no time. But I do see the same parents at all the kids activities. That's close enough, right?

I would not have guessed I would have quit drinking in my 20s, pretty sound financial decision.

You mean you own a house? Wow man congrats!

Excuse you, I'm waiting in videogame lobby as we speak while browsing through Lemmy to pass few seconds as I wait for other players to join. Ohhh, there's the beep. I must play now.

I feel for the new generation.

Some were born in recession, grew up in covid lockdowns, studying with AI slop, and the the job market is shit. And some losers are trying to create unending wars.

The world is now on hard mode by default.

How I Met Your Mother is so interesting to me because the best parts about it stem from the fact that it's characters are all horrible people. Yet the writer's clearly don't realise this very obvious fact about their own show.

Also, it wholly erased it's own place in the culture by having an absolutely trash final season.

It's also deeply, libidinally, transphobic. Like, holy shit it's so bad