Everything Is Terrible
by Adam Stone
My friend Ruben tells me that everything is terrible and I’m inclined to agree with him, to the degree that it’s become a running joke between us. In casual conversation, one of us will note that summers have gotten hotter, or that the kids today are entitled little twerps. The other will promptly reply, “Well, everything is terrible.”
We’ll have a little chuckle and move on to another topic.
“Everything is terrible.” It’s tidy, an elegant maxim. Fits on a bumper sticker. Means what it says. I realize it bears some explaining. Give me just a couple minutes for that, and then I’ll tell you about Chantur, the alien who lives down the hall.
Politics is terrible, the state of it and how it’s conducted and everything it does or doesn’t do. I don’t care which side of the aisle you’re on, or if you straddle the line like a bull-rider in a rodeo or steadfastly declare yourself above the fray. You know it, and I know it: Nothing good comes out of a politician’s mouth, and anything resembling truth comes out the other end of them.
That’s just one example, but the list goes on. In fairness, Ruben came to his epic realization neither by deep introspection nor through serious observation of the human condition. He started to realize that everything was terrible when his job became intolerable.
Ruben is a computer programmer or was until computer programming went all to hell. “Now I’m a cog in the wheel,” he tells me. When he first expressed this idea, I figured it was because AI was doing all the coding now, but that wasn’t it.
“It’s gotten too corporate,” he explained. “We used to have fun. We’d just bang out lines of code and we made apps that did stuff. It was direct, meaningful. Now it’s layers of review. It’s quality control. It’s...”
He goes on like that for a while, but I know that is only half the truth. Ruben’s job sucks because he works with Ethan. Ruben’s been programming a lot longer, but Ethan has one dinky credential more on his resume, one measly certification, and he thinks that makes him cock of the roost. He’s condescending, likes to give orders, and makes each project far more complicated than it needs to be. Ethan is terrible.
Ergo, everything is terrible.
Ruben has skills that I admire. My dad owned a screwdriver, I think, and I never saw him use it. Ruben is an accomplished cabinetmaker and, if he could, he’d quit his job in a second, change professions and build lavish custom kitchen storage for wealthy people. He’d run a neighborhood workshop where he would teach kids the trade, if they wanted to learn.
He can’t do all that, because... money. If he had time, he could finish upgrading his house, sell it, make a bundle, and then launch his career as a master cabinetmaker and community education guy. But he doesn’t have time because he works long hours. He works long hours, because... money. And so on. The entire system is terrible.
Everything’s terrible.
The weather is terrible, everyone more or less agrees, unless you’re lucky enough to live in southern California, where it’s a perfect spring day every single damn day of the year. A kind of glorious monotony that is, in itself, terrible.
And if you don’t live in southern California, it’s too hot or rainy or hurricane-y or on fire, and so on. The news says this summer will be a record everything everywhere, and the farmers can’t water their crops while the insurance companies know better than anyone else that anything within fifty yards of the ocean is going under sooner or later, and probably sooner. Most people agree this is largely because humans have farted up the atmosphere, possibly beyond saving, but nobody wants to give up their car or buy less junk or eat less beef or do kinda-sorta anything to make it better. Because people are terrible.
Not you, of course. You’re the best. You know that without my having to tell you. You do everything for all the right reasons, and if you still end up screwing the pooch, you do it with all the best intentions. So you’re fine. It’s everyone else. They suck.
I don’t want to drone on about it, but we need to bring the big picture into focus before we can get to the real point of all this.
Television is terrible. And friends’ recommendations for television — “You simply must watch” — only serve to remind you that 1) television is terrible and 2) your friends are nitwits. Movies are worse, especially now that Marvel is down to scraping sludge off the sides of the dumpster. Maybe movies always sucked, but they suck worse or harder now, and movie theaters are out of the question. No pause button for when I have to pee? And $16 for popcorn? Everything is terrible.
Medicine is arguably wonderful except that most people on the planet can’t get it, not the way we can in America, and even for most of us it’s touch and go. Also they keep you alive way too long, which I get. I respect the intention. But when someone’s clearly past their expiration date and the doctors just keep them dragging on and on... well. It’s not lovely, is it, crawling to the finish line that way?
Cats are terrible, in all the same ways as people. Selfish, egotistical, heedless of the chaos they sow and indifferent to the consequences.
Most food is terrible, and we don’t even know it because we’re so used to it. In the supermarkets: Processed to the point of being unrecognizable. In the restaurants: Lowest common denominator, mostly pale tan objects with a crispy coating. Yes, I know: Anyone with a little imagination can still cook, really cook, make something truly wonderful. If they have time. But they don’t have time. Because work. Because money. Ergo, everything is — for last time, and then we get to the main point of all this — terrible.
Science fiction is terrible.
Read the room, man!
Yeah, I get it. But I know this for a hard, cold fact, because my next-door neighbor tells me so. Chantur came here from the Krnkt system ten years ago with the rest of the Krnkts and, when he’s not working the morning shift down at the bakery, he reads science fiction, every kind and flavor of the stuff.
At first the stories about star-hopping and interplanetary discovery made him feel like he was back at home. Not that he is ever going home. The Krnkts who came to Earth were the last, and they’d been lucky to get out alive. It’s a long story that I won’t get into now: The point is just that poor, bewildered Chantur found some solace in sci-fi when he first got here.
“But it’s all just awful,” he tells me. Sort of tells me. Since his larynx-type thing is shaped like a big V, he can only make these sort of gargling, squeaky sounds. It’s pretty awful when a bunch of Krnkts get together and yammer in the native tongue, not that they have tongues. But he’s got a vocal translator that he uses, they all do, and it allows us to converse freely when one or the other of us tramps down the hall to bang on the other’s door.
Our apartment complex was built to warehouse recent college graduates and newly-divorced men. The apartments are all the same except that some have fireplaces. There’s a dinky gym and a pool no one uses. It’s terrible.
I live there because my wife asked me eight months back to vacate her life, our marriage, and our home. It’s a long story that I won’t get into now: The point is that I’ve got a bed and a few knickknacks and some interesting neighbors. There’s Gretchen from the gym who I thought might be interested in me — there’s more to that story, but hang on a second — and there’s Chantur who moved out of the Krnkt enclave to see how humans live.
He gave it a try for a while, joined some clubs, met some folks, found us about as dull as his Krnkt kin. Then he became the full-blown, certified, hardcore sci-fi nerd that he is now and, I suspect, always will be. He hates the stuff, but he loves to argue with it. He writes letters to the editors.
“This makes no sense,” he’ll tell me, reading aloud from a book he got on Amazon. “Even if you could travel like that, how far could you get? It would take about a trillion years.”
Or, tossing me a magazine and insisting I glance over the cover story: “How can they all be breathing the same atmosphere?” Krnkts can breathe our air but it doesn’t do anything for them. They all wear nitrogen pumps that inject their blood every twenty seconds.
Of course, sci-fi has changed a lot since the Krnkts got here. No one writes first-encounter stories anymore, and I think that’s at the heart of Chantur’s complaint. He likes the old stuff, the classic stuff. What would that first meeting be like? What would we say to each other assuming they come here and don’t immediately obliterate us or we go there and don’t try right off to enslave them?
The humans and the Krnkts have learned a lot from each other. They have a God too, with an unpronounceable name and a lot of nifty attributes. Their mathematics line up with ours, as do their physics. They have love, more or less like we do, but they’re a lot less hung up about matching male to female. The Krnkts play it very loose on that score, which caused some consternation at first in some circles, as you can imagine. But that more or less died down when the righteous people realized that the Krnkts couldn’t mate with humans. Maybe they were setting a bad example for the children, the righteous people decided, but wasn’t it nice to have an evil in your midst that you could hold up as a warning?
They haven’t spilled the beans on interstellar travel and won’t. The Krnkt Council said we weren’t ready for it and no amount of pressure, persuasion, bribery, or begging could pry it loose from them. I suspect that might be for our own good.
Maybe it seems funny that an interstellar traveler would work in a bakery, getting up at 3 a.m. to shape sourdough rounds and shove them in the oven. Well, the Krnkts work a lot of jobs, and there are over- and under-achievers among them. That’s something else we have in common.
Chantur likes the bakery hours: They give him afternoons free to read novels and short stories, and to write long, complaining letters to the magazine editors and book publishers. Sometimes they promise to fix it in the next edition. Mostly they ignore him but, in fairness, most sci-fi editors already are straining their brains to read through the slush pile, looking for that nugget of gold amidst all the dreck.
Two things happened this week that I’ll mention, I guess by way of postscript. Two nights ago, I was hanging out with Chantur in his apartment. I was drinking a beer, and he was scooping up that green, stinky gel the Krnkts use to relax. I asked him if he misses Krnkt. He told me he was only a kid when he left and, anyway, the planet was mostly on fire by then. The forests he’d played in had been incinerated: He has a vague, sad memory of standing in the road watching the smoke rise up from behind the neighbors’ dwellings. Bye-bye, Krnkt.
Then last night I saw Gretchen in the gym and finally worked up the nerve to ask her out. It’s not just that she declined. It’s the look in her eyes, a look that can only be called pity. She was telling me I was playing outside my league, punching above my weight. You know what I mean. It hurt; that’s the point of all this. Gretchen is easy to talk to, and I had thought that maybe there was something there. But there wasn’t. Obviously.
When I got back to my apartment, I called Ruben and shared my tale of romantic woe. I lamented my present and, likely, eternal loveless state.
You know what he told me.
Copyright © 2026 by Adam Stone
