I’ve just returned from a retreat upstate where maverick entrepreneurs like myself can get away from the city, network, and blend powerful hallucinogenic mushrooms to consume with their morning smoothies.
These retreats are popular amongst entrepreneurs, since the revelations about the human condition you experience after consuming powerful hallucinogenic mushrooms just make it that much easier to come up with future Fortune 500 companies. This is obviously the best use for them.
My trip was magical. I felt the kind of curiosity for the natural world I hadn’t enjoyed since childhood. I wondered if it hurts dead leaves when we step on them and was moved to tears by the idea that it might. But that was nothing compared to the profundity of the moment I looked a white-tailed deer dead in the eyes and realized: “Hey, why don’t animals have jobs?”
I spent the next hour euphoric over the possibilities of an animal-based workforce, liberating much of humanity from toil. A deer might not be able to use a spreadsheet, but you can’t seriously tell me it couldn’t learn to push a shopping cart around a parking lot without dinging the cars. We wouldn’t have to pay them minimum wage because they don’t know what money is. And even if they did they still don’t have to spend it on clothes and insurance and stuff.
I spent the next several hours after that increasingly furious about what a drain these layabout animals inflicted on state resources. They don’t pay rent at those national parks they live in—taxpayers do it for them. Deers don’t pay taxes. And they definitely don’t think up galaxy-brained solutions to humanity’s problems like I do. They just take and take and take, then poop it out in little pellet piles that shimmered kaleidoscopically before my eyes if I stared at them hard enough.
When we all reconvened in the sauna to share what looking directly at our souls had revealed to us, the vast majority of the other entrepreneurs said they had also become livid that animals didn’t have jobs. This was good. It meant we were onto something.
But the last entrepreneur to speak didn’t care about lazy deer at all. Instead, he asked:
“Why don’t we let children fight our wars for us?”
A great point. Why don’t we let children fight our wars for us? They’re spry, they have great eyesight, and anyone who’s watched them play their computer games knows they display a real aptitude for tactical thinking. Plus, they have the most life ahead of them, which means they have the most incentive not to die, and the most to gain from living in a country victorious over its enemies. In fact, it’s pretty annoying that children haven’t been fighting our wars for us this whole time. I bet the brats would say they were too busy “going to school” to fight our wars. God, this mushroom smoothie was really putting things in perspective.
Sitting around the campfire that night, we let our gaze wash contentedly over the flickering flames in silence until I finally said what I assumed everyone was thinking.
“Why shouldn’t your flesh nourish mine?”
And indeed, when I did roast and eat my fellow entrepreneurs, I wasn’t even because I was that hungry. It just felt fair! The alternative would be someone else roasting and eating my flesh to nourish theirs, which doesn’t really make any sense to me.
So the retreat was a big success, especially after I sold my new business idea—a private army of deer-mounted children—for 300 million dollars. Maybe I’d been too dismissive of my hippie friends who'd spent college doin’ shrooms and talking about how much they love each other.
Maybe some drugs don’t change you—they just let you become who you really are.