Someone has to speak honestly about excess. About drugs. About the savage clarity of early-morning hallucinations. About the promises we make far too young. And about Hunter S. Thompson.
He entered my life in 1994—uninvited, but perfectly timed—when his biography showed up in the mail without warning. I was thrilled, for several reasons. First, because the Universe clearly moonlights as my personal librarian. Second, because each of the book’s 352 pages sent me deeper into a delirium than any crack binge I later experimented with. But mostly, because it set me on a trajectory I’ve followed ever since.
I had just turned sixteen and was, predictably, a terrified idiot.
Fear, by the way, is one of the poisoned gifts of precocity.
Reading too much, thinking too hard — these things have a way of dragging truths out of the shadows. Even the ones you’d rather keep hidden. I spent much of my adolescence haunted by the kind of fear usually reserved for people at the end of their lives. The kind of fear that makes you realize life isn’t a journey, it’s an ambush. Full of traps, strange detours, and the creeping suspicion that the worst is always yet to come.
And then came The Strange and Savage Life of Hunter S. Thompson — a book that didn’t just find me, it mugged me in an alley and rewired my brain. Somewhere between the chaos and the cocaine residue of its pages, something clicked:
Life isn’t a path. It’s a prank.
It punishes precision. It humiliates those who plan.
And it goes out of its way to wreck the dreams of anyone who dares say, “I know what I want.”
That book shattered the glass case around a word I used to hate: journalism.
Suddenly, it wasn’t about truth or ethics or structure. It was about style. Collapse. Risk.
It was a job where failure could pass for poetry —
where the useful and the useless were roommates —
and where the boundary between real and unreal was so thin, you could snort it.
Looking back? No, Hunter wasn’t a blueprint.
But he was something more important:
Permission.
Permission to live a life worth documenting.
To believe that excess is a narrative choice.
That imbalance isn’t a flaw — it’s a form of honesty. And that sometimes, the most professional thing you can do is fall apart with conviction.
The book didn’t end with the last page — it ended with a promise.
Because somewhere in the wreckage of my teenage brain — flooded with unregulated dopamine and literary crushes — I made a vow:
To leave the door open. Just wide enough for a bit of his madness to sneak in, and stay awhile.
Why I made that promise, I have no idea.
With all due respect to teenagers — and their enviable gift for phantasmagoria — the truth is: at sixteen, you know nothing. And what little you think you know is spectacularly wrong.
A decent example? Just ask a teenager what happens after forty.
In the adolescent imagination, turning forty means one thing: collapse. Prostate malfunctions. A belly that spreads like jihadist extremism across the Sahel. And insomnia — vast, biblical insomnia — that settles in until death. It doesn’t matter how gracefully you try to age. From the high seat of sixteen, every promise you make sounds like a hallucination in disguise — a beautiful glitch destined to ruin the code of your future.
Let me make it simple: life is a rocket. It moves upward on a graph.
The vertical axis: physical time.
The horizontal one: psychological time — your perception of meaning.
The rocket launches at birth and is meant to arc toward something vaguely profound. Then, eventually, it slams into the horizontal axis in a soft, poetic crash called death.
But in the teenager’s mind? That rocket hits an imaginary glass ceiling at forty and plummets. Game over.
The shape of life, for them, is an ∩ — an upside-down U.
That’s the native geometry of their cosmic software.
Everything past the midpoint is just: decline. entropy. embarrassing dad jokes.
Or, as they so graciously put it:
“You’re done, old man.”
Roughly a day ago, I turned forty. Which, if you subscribe to the ∩ theory of life (you know, birth—peak—slow-motion collapse), means I’d officially bounced off the ceiling of my physical timeline and entered free fall. For the first time ever, I was perfectly colinear with my own death. A poetic alignment, if you ignore the heartburn.
Naturally, I took it as a sign.
A sign to consume pantagruelian amounts of cocaine.
But since even collapse needs a concept deck, I rebranded the whole spiral as a shamanic expedition. A pilgrimage through debris. Armed with synthetic revelations, pixelated self-compassion, and a single, flickering question — Is life still worth living after forty? — I dove in.
Forty-eight hours later, drifting somewhere between dream-paralysis and the quiet terrorism of withdrawal, I think I came back with an answer. Not a cure — an aphorism:
“Maturity is the most unhygienic lollipop humanity has ever sucked on.”
And maybe even a mission:
“Ungrow yourself. Unbecome the adult they conscripted you to be.”
Which, frankly, makes perfect sense. If humanity ever hosted a golden age of immaturity, it’s now. The third millennium. An entire era built so you can live — cradle to cremation — with the inner stance of an adolescent who never agreed to grow up.
Sure, we can’t stay kids forever — biology is a bureaucrat with no sense of humor. Growth hormones are fascists. Your thymus shrinks. Your ovaries or testicles punch in, clock out, fulfill their evolutionary contract. One day you’re sipping energy drinks at 2 a.m., the next you’re getting targeted ads for bunion surgery, addressed to your full legal name in Times New Roman.
But mentally? Mentally, we must preserve a kind of sacred ambiguity. Feed it with excess. Dress it in irony. Water it with disregard. Keep alive that sweet, belligerent instinct to stay gloriously unfinished — gloriously unready. To remain juveniles of the soul. Maladjusted in all the right ways.
Because maturity — this grotesque idol we polish from cradle to grave — is just spiritual progeria. A premature aging of the soul. An accelerated collapse of all the parts that once made you unbearable in the best way.
To be “mature” today?
It means having a job you loathe but still pledge 16 hours a day to, like it’s some kind of capitalist Stockholm syndrome.
It means owning a house that never feels like yours — but which will quietly siphon your joy (and your credit score) for the next half-century.
It means clinging to a circle of “friends” you trust about as much as a rental scooter in a snowstorm — decorative liabilities with Instagram accounts.
Maturity is the world’s most socially acceptable form of dying before you’re dead.
Eventually, when you finally look at your life with unfiltered honesty, you’ll realize you’ve become your own contradiction. And you’ll start to hate yourself for it. And that self-hatred will slowly begin to etch itself into your bitter smile. And that — that’s what will finally make you despise yourself. Not all at once, of course. It starts as a flicker. A small, bitter tic that shows up on your face every time you think about the life you didn’t live. The things you could’ve done. The people you might’ve been.
If someone — early enough in life — had just pulled you aside and whispered the truth, maybe things would’ve unraveled differently:
That maturity is a false virtue.
More toxic than sugar. More addictive than nicotine.
That it’s the final resting place of the boring, the sanctuary of the unimaginative, and the express route to early-onset spiritual sclerosis.
Maybe then — just maybe — you’d still have a shot.
A shot at becoming something other than a polite obituary in motion.
So here it is — on June 1st, Children’s Day — a love letter to all the grown-ups who’ve gone off-script.
To the ones who still feel like intruders in their own age group.
To those quietly allergic to mortgages, HR pep talks, and “wellness.”
To the ones who look in the mirror and think: This can’t be it. I refuse to be fully assembled.
And to them — to us — I say:
Happy Birthday.
Not the version with balloons and frosting.
The other kind.
The one where you hit forty, blink twice, and decide to reverse-engineer your entire personality — not because it’s wise, but because it’s the only thing that still feels honest.
Not a rebirth. Not a midlife crisis.
Just… a strategic glitch in the adulting software.
Celebrate accordingly.
Andrei Jebeleanu 