We at Credit Karma are ecstatic to bring you this news, Brandon, which will inevitably transform your meager and shitty life. We are literally peeing ourselves, but at the same time deeply honored and humbled to be a part of this moment. We know you will look back on it as a grand turning point years hence. Maybe from the porch of a palatial estate, or surrounded by your well-heeled progeny at a gathering where you are the beloved honoree. You’ll reminisce on your life and say “Ah yes, that email is what brought me here—that was the day I started living.” That’s right, Brandon, you have been hand-selected to apply for a Discover Miles® credit card.
What a great and glorious day it is.
Hand-selected by whom, you ask? God. He got together with all the angels, Betty White, and your childhood dog, and they had a long hard think about how things are going down here. Or up here—whichever direction your God is oriented toward the mortal realm. We’re agnostic at Credit Karma, despite what our name suggests about our religious worldview.
You may have begun to think you were nothing special after all. Despite the potential everyone lauded in your youth, despite the world that seemed so bright and full of promise, which surely had a place just for you, in which your unique talents could be expressed and appreciated to their fullest degree. You may have come to believe that all this was an illusion, and you were just ordinary. Or maybe not even ordinary. It was a niggling thought at the back of your mind, which you drowned with greater and greater ambitions.
Until finally, it felt like a painful truth, then just a regular one: you were not special. You were the same as everyone. And that was fine; it was real, and grounding. It became a comforting thought. Worse was the growing realization that all your efforts went unnoticed: the sacrifices you made, the ways you gave both personally and professionally that were so often taken for granted, the way you tried—you tried so hard—to be a good and worthy person. You felt that, even as another unremarkable face in the throng, your efforts must still have value. That the promise of the fruits of hard work couldn’t be an illusion as well. The looming certainty that this too was a lie, that the things you poured your time into scarcely mattered to anyone but yourself, became a low and grinding background disappointment which occasionally reared up and stung you as a familiar pang in the chest.
How wrong you were, Brandon.
We at Credit Karma are thrilled to let you know that all was not in vain. Every late night and moment of personal triumph led you here. God saw all that stuff, and he said: this man is the only one of my children (or however your religious text euphemizes you) fit to reap my greatest blessing: an invitation to qualify for a Discover Miles® credit card.
Even though we know from your student loan balance that the last—and we mean the very last—thing you could possibly need is more debt, Miles® points or no, we think it’s a really great idea for you to apply for this card. We’re so very sure that you’ll get it.
Welcome to the first day of the rest of your life.