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I Dared My Best Friend To Ruin My Life Part 1

My name is Zander, and my best friend is trying to ruin my life. It started out very small, but has quickly grown out of control.

I'm currently sitting inside a church, using their WiFi to post this story and taking advantage of their air conditioning. I'm posting this story in case... Well in case he finds me and kills me soon. It's only a matter of time now, and I want someone to know what happened before I die.

Two years ago, my friend David and I were sitting on the couch at my house thoroughly bored. It wasn't a temporary boredom either. It was a resounding boredom with life. We both worked full time at the local movie theater making minimum wage and cleaning up after idiots who couldn't keep popcorn and soda in their mouths. We had graduated high school two years prior and had no plans to attend college.

Life looked bleak for us. College didn't sound appealing, work was annoying, and the little free time we had was blown on video games and YouTube. We both still lived with our parents too, which made dating somewhat embarrassing. Looking back, I'm sure we were suffering from mild depression on top of everything else.

These life circumstances blended together to create the perfect storm for what I now have to call my reality.

As we sat on the couch at my parent's house, channel surfing the TV, David asked me if I was bored with life. I responded in the positive, and he sighed.

"High school was so easy because we knew our purpose and our goals were set for us. Outline the english essay. Finish the math homework. Get decent grades. Pass the driving exam. Be home by curfew. Find a girlfriend. Now that we're out of high school, there's no structure. Our lives have become meaningless and we are just floating through space with no aim or purpose."

"Would you go back to high school then?" I asked. He shook his head.

"In the moment, high school was annoying. It's only after looking back that I see how much better it was than I realized."

"What's the solution, then?" I asked.

"Either go somewhere that has structure and can deliver what high school gave us, or create our own structure," David replied.

"Well I don't want to go to college or the military," I said. "And I can't think of anywhere else that provides the same structure. Guess I have to make my own, but I have no idea where to start."

"The thing about high school was that it required a minimum effort. If you didn't give that minimum effort, you would face the consequences. The consequences were bad enough that you and I would put effort into school. When high school ended, that minimum effort level decreased. Now our minimum effort is not enough to improve ourselves. Whatever structure we build has to have those consequences built in and a minimum effort that forces us to improve constantly."

David was, and is, a very intellectual person. He thinks about everything, if you can't already tell. I was pretty dumb compared to him, but I stuck around because he always had interesting things to say. This conversation definitely counted as interesting.

I won't bore you with the entire conversation that we had, but it lasted an hour where we discussed how to build structure into our lives.

I want to emphasize here that boredom is dangerous. Well, it's not dangerous by itself, but it can quickly lead to dangerous things. Boredom can lead to pain, accidental children, technology that disrupts a monopoly, and even death.

Our boredom led to a dare.

"I dare you to try and ruin my life," David said.

"What does that mean?" I asked.