Old people are always making up stupid stuff to tell young people how to live their lives. (Yeah? If you’re so smart, how come ya got old?) These “wise” old sayings used to show up on kitchen plaques and bumper stickers, but now they crawl around Facebook like ants at a picnic. Most of them were thought up hundreds of years ago, when people had nothing to do but sit around and actually talk to each other. Those days are gone. So, as a public service, here’s a remix of just a few of these geriatric proverbs to reflect real life in the 21st century.
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a credit card.
If you can change just one person’s life … that really isn’t good enough, is it?
You can’t tell a book by its … book? Book? What’s a book?
Beauty is only skin deep. Is that “beauty shaming?” “That might be “beauty shaming?” Do you think that’s “beauty shaming?”
The meek shall inherit the Earth — until some ratbag lawyer decides to contest the will.
(This is not a comment about any particular ratbag lawyer, so forget about suing me!)
Cheaters never prosper. They just win elections.
If at first you don’t succeed … there’s an App for that.
He who hesitates doesn’t have a Twitter account.
Money isn’t everything, but it’s sure as hell ahead of whatever’s in second place.
Do unto others — cuz eventually they’re going to show up and do unto you.
The early bird catches the worm. But nobody ever thinks about the early worm. What about the early worm? WILL NOBODY THINK OF THE EARLY WORM?
History repeats itself. Cool! I’m totally getting a dinosaur.
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names – now, that’s the real problem. They can cause deep psychological issues that last for decades. We need to have trigger warnings on names.
The pen is mightier than the sword. This is a joke, right?
Never put off ‘til tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow – or next week, or sometime in the near future, or ….
No news is – uh – well, at least it’s not fake news.
The road to hell is paved. That’s why so many people go that way.
Seeing is believing — unless your friends have Photoshop.
When the going gets tough, most people wander away and watch Netflix.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Out of sight out of mind. Uh . . . I’m confused.
And finally:
What doesn’t kill you can put you in intensive care for six months where you become addicted to painkillers. Then, when you get out of the hospital, you spend all your money on illegal drugs, lose your job, your house and your wife leaves you. Finally, you end up living on the street, eating out of garbage cans and selling your body to buy crack. But, wow, are you ever strong!
Not that long ago, Social Media was being called the greatest gift to democracy since Jefferson. How the mighty have fallen! The problem is a) you don’t have to take an IQ test to own a computer and b) statistically, half the people who have computers would fail it if there was one. The result is Social Media is over-populated by people on the bottom end of the “I’m-just-as-smart-as-you-are” scale, and the rest of us can’t disagree with them because that’s some kind of brain-shaming or something. Meanwhile, these (for want of a better term) stupid people have reduced the conversation to the lowest common denominator which includes bashing everybody over the head with industrial-strength platitudes. And, unfortunately, unlike cute cat videos, attaching deep meaning to meaningless clichés digs a deeper hole in the cyber-stupid and that just makes it harder and harder for any of us to get out. Let me show you what I mean.
There are three kinds of people in the world: realists, cynics and idiots — and it’s very easy to tell them apart. Realists see a glass half full of water and, if they’re thirsty, drink it. Cynics see a glass half full of water and race for Social Media to tell the world Donald Trump peed in it. And idiots don’t even see the water. All they see is an opportunity to create some metaphorical homily that’s supposed to enlighten the rest of us who haven’t noticed life’s intrinsic meaning. Crap like, “It’s always darkest before the dawn” (a physical impossibility) or “Strangers are just friends you haven’t met yet.” (Tell that to Mary Ann Nichols who met Jack the Ripper for the first time in 1888.) Here are some other examples of this dumbass bumper sticker philosophy:
WD Fyfe 