Young people are more stressed out than middle-aged people.

The theory is that this is because young people basically suck at managing their stress levels and middle-aged people have elementary things like stress on lock.

The great thing about theories, however, is that you can have more than one of them — so here’s my theory: Twenty-somethings are like five-year-olds with responsibilities. Obviously, this is stressful.

When you’re five, you don’t know anything. The thing is, though, you know you don’t know anything, so you constantly have to ask people questions about everything. This continues on and on until you’re about sixteen.

Being sixteen will be the summit of your intellectual existence, because when you’re sixteen, you know everything and you have no idea that you actually don’t know anything. Few things in life are innately this fantastic.

Several birthdays and hangovers later, you find yourself in your twenties and you feel like a five-year-old again, except now, people actually expect you to know things. And not things like the tenets of existentialism, the origin of the white wedding dress, Bertrand’s box paradox and related dinner topics regularly examined by pseudo-intellectuals in order to figure out who got the most irrelevant liberal arts degree, but real things.

Like how to get the job for experience that you need experience to get. Like how to manage the finances that you don’t have. Like credit. And student loans — apparently you do have to pay for those at some point. Like how to buy groceries that are somewhat influenced by the food pyramid and whether or not you should be using night cream at this stage in your life and the fine art of avoiding contact with anyone who might inquire as to what you’re up to these days and what to do when you realize you are your mother and why people don’t say what they actually mean and understanding your vagina and its disconcerting display of several personality disorders.

I mean, it’s exhausting.

Whenever I feel overwhelmed with my life, I reminisce about my childhood. Those were the days, weren’t they? I may not have this whole adulthood thing figured out, but I’ll always have fifth grade.

Except — were those the days? Were my glory days really the time period in which I wanted to be Baby Spice, carried my mom’s maxi-pads around in my backpack in an effort to pretend that I’d already gotten my period like everyone else, and considered my boyfriend to be a guy whose ultimate career aspiration, according to our fifth grade yearbook, was to be a “Pokémon master”?

Like, those better not have been the fucking days. If those were really the best days of my life and it’s all downhill from here, then what the hell am I doing? I mean, really, what is anyone doing? Do they think they’re going to wake up 30 years from now with more bills, more wrinkles, an elevated risk of all deadly conditions, and that somehow, life is going to be better?

I need a stress ball.