There’s a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon that has lived rent-free in my brain ever since I first read it when I was a kid.
Basically, it goes something like this: Calvin and his family are driving over a bridge and Calvin sees a sign for the bridge’s maximum weight. So he asks his Dad how they know what the bridge’s weight limit is?
The dad takes a pause and then answers (with a kind of perfect autopilot look on his face; Bill Watterson is a genius) something along the lines of: “Well they build the bridge. Then they drive heavier and heavier trucks over it until it breaks. Then they weigh the last truck and then they rebuild the bridge.”
There’s a pause as everyone in the car absorbs what he’s just said and then Calvin’s mom looks over at her husband and says, “Honey if you don’t actually know the answer just say so.”
I truly think about this cartoon way more than I should. Certainly way more than things that actually affect my life, like taxes and getting round to fixing the beginning-to-flake paint in my bathroom, and how much cheese on a toasted cheese is too much cheese. (And before any of you smartarses answers “there’s no such thing as too much cheese”, there is definitely a cheese tipping point and anyone who says otherwise is just saying that in a desperate play for cheap likes on TikTok.)
The reason I think about it so much is that I think it might be the most succinct metaphor for the mechanics behind just about every meaningful life lesson I’ve ever learnt.
From work burnout in my late 20s, a divorce, a sort-of business in my 30s that didn’t really make it, my approach to exercise, food, drinking … anything – it always felt like I was just driving heavier and heavier trucks over myself until I broke, then hoping there was enough left in the rubble to scrape back together to rebuild and put a sign up that says: “My Limit Is Here.”
As far as effective life philosophies go, it’s about on par with using a military-grade flame-thrower to get rid of a mosquito in your bedroom. It’s the “This is Fine” meme: the glassy-eyed dog drinking his tea in his very-much-on-fire living room wondering (as all of us must) when he’ll get to the point where it’s not fine any more.
I think there are a bunch of different versions of that happening with lots of us at the moment – whether it’s uncontrollable 2am doomscrolling, fixating on 24-hour news channels with the same energy we rubberneck a car accident, endlessly swiping through the same 12 people on dating apps, compulsively buying questionably-made replica squirrels on Temu, CrossFit classes, new side-hustles, trying to figure out if we actually can realistically afford to move to Cape Town, or posting rictus-grin selfies on social media so that everyone knows just how much we’re enjoying the seventh end-of-year function we’re at and it’s only Wednesday. It feels like, big, small or medium, those trucks are rumbling their way over us all.
Or maybe this is a generational thing. Maybe I belong to a generation that, largely-speaking, just … doesn’t know any better? A generation that doesn’t have the tools to say: “Wait, no, I don’t like this, and I’d like it to stop please.”
Enough with the trucks
The reason I maybe think this is because of a vital research document I recently came across, otherwise known as “a show I watched on Netflix”.
In an episode of Nobody Wants This (which I seriously debated using as the name of this column), Kristen Bell’s character experiences a moment with Adam Brody’s hot rabbi where she gets “the ick”.
Now, “gave me the ick” is a term that’s been floating around on social media for a while, but this was the moment it got in front of The Olds and entered the general zeitgeist. Basically “the ick” is a handbrake turning point in just about any dynamic (but most commonly relationships), where you U-turn from adoration to repulsion.
It can be anything from finding out the girl you’re going on a second date with does a full-on French accent every time she says “croissant”, to discovering that the man you’re letting touch your boobs taxidermied Jellytot, the family Maltese poodle, and keeps it permanently at the foot of his bed where it now just watches you … all … the … time.
The ick can be found anywhere. It can be someone who wears a beanie inside in summer, to your manager who insists on writing it as “kewl” in emails.
Having a sort-of flippant, play-groundish descriptive term that defuses the emotional baggage of the whole thing feels like Gen Z quietly giving the rest of us an emotional tool. The same way Bill Gates gave us Excel, but perhaps with slightly less crocodilian, gleeful hand-rubbing. It’s a gentle way of allowing ourselves to say: “Hey, maybe don’t do that thing with the trucks any more.”
If we’re suddenly allowed to just stop in our tracks and say, “I’m not sure if I like this and I’m going to stop now,” it feels like way fewer of us are going to continue tolerating situations we know aren’t actually that great for us. Like drinking red Zappa sambuca until a pillow was vomited on in a way that made it look like someone ritually sacrificed Jellytot the Maltese.
Anyway. Temu’s got a sale on home taxidermy kits, gotta go.
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