Seinfeld’s fake holiday of Festivus, which Jerry Stiller so memorably explained to the world in December 1997, has become an icon in pop-culture. Everything from the slogan to the ritual airing of grievances allows us to have a few laughs during the stress of the holiday season. I’ve included the video below so you can learn about the magic of Festivus, and then I shall begin the airing of my grievances.
Grievance Time!
2024, you started with so much promise.
I got to take an incredible trip to Guatemala and see what a wonderful place it is (also got to stay at a killer AirBnB for the trip), watch a good friend get married in a historic convent, and scored Oasis tickets for next summer.
Liverpool (LFC), my amazing Reds, are playing world-beating soccer/football and might win a treble (Premier League, Carabao Cup, Champions League).
The Detroit Lions, the unluckiest football franchise of the last five decades and my hometown team, got off to their best start in history.
We were millimeters away from a decade-long nightmare ending.
Joe Biden stepped down and allowed Kamala Harris to take a run at the presidency—a campaign that looked like it would overwhelm Republicans and save democracy for its first weeks.
Aaron Rodgers returned…to a terrible Jets team and got exposed for the fraud he is.
And then, 2024, you went and pissed me off.
You’ve threatened our Super Bowl dreams in Detroit with an injury list long enough to field a full offense and defense.
You made enough people feel like the lying, grifting, criminal, insurrectionist thug we kicked out four years ago was somebody to miss, and now the next four years might shred what’s left of my sanity.
Inflation keeps hitting us harder…and I’ve gone over two years without a raise despite taking on more responsibility and single-handedly saving clients from leaving our company.
Some empty-headed pretty blonde girl went viral for a week and pulled off a successful crypto scam to become a millionaire..after getting a podcast deal…because she made a joke about blowjobs.
You made me learn about influencers named Mr. Beast, The Rizzler, and Baby Gronk. My IQ dropped 15 points just writing that last sentence.
You took college football, the one sport I could reliably find on one of three channels every single week for the Michigan Wolverines, and turned it into a scavenger hunt. Is it on Fox? FS1? NBC? Peacock? CBS? Big Ten Network? ESPN? TBS? All that, and the NCAA is concerned about large NIL payments to prominent players. How about making football accessible again, you useless twits?
You made everything a streaming service, and then when we were promised that paying for streaming would eliminate ads, every service introduced ads and asked for more money to get rid of them. It’s cable but worse now.
Artificial intelligence. I can confidently say with working knowledge and practical experience in training an AI model before that this is the most overhyped garbage since the AOL-Time Warner merger of 1999/2000. AI is being promised as a solution for our problems, when the reality is that a few more techbros want to become billionaires and are doing their damnedest to steal actual creative work from humans and claim it as their own. Everything, everything that is generated by an artificial intelligence model is synthesizing the work of human beings and spitting out slightly modified replicas of that work. AI cannot detect a stop sign when snow is covering part of it. AI cannot properly cite a single source of information—whether it be legal, medical, or educational—and like a child caught behaving poorly, will invent false stories to try and escape responsibility. AI does not create. It’s a giant vortex that sucks human creativity dry so that nerds like Sam Altman can grow up to be another Elon Musk, and do we really need a second one when the first one is such a stupendous asshole?
We need less techbros. We need less technology designed to further impoverish human beings, the ones who are sentient, alive, and require more than a power source and microprocessors to survive. We need less social media. We need less hate. We need less war. We need less of everything we’re getting right now. Our leaders are failing us. Our country, and both of its major political parties, have abused us for so long that the people are now falling for the babblings of a heroin addict with Swiss cheese for a brain who wants you to drink disgusting, bacteria-laden raw milk, avoid vaccines, and not receive the prescription medications that keep the darkness away and allow you to live a productive and fulfilling life.
It’s become so bad that there is a real chance of polio making a return. POLIO. One of the worst diseases in human history, murderous, crippling, ruinous. Defeated by science and held at bay by science for decades, now at risk of returning. Measles is on the rise. Whooping cough. Should we try for smallpox? I mean, we’re already looking at my generation being the last to live our entire lives on this planet, so why not accelerate the downfall? Oh, you’re worried about burning to death or drowning in the rising seas? Here, let’s give you a disease-riddled populace to increase your chances of a horrid death.
So, to 2024, Donald Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Elon Musk, Bill Ackman, Bari Weiss, techbros, Bibi Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Hawk Tuah girl, Matt Gaetz, JD Vance, idiot congresspeople, ancient politicians who won’t retire when they should, and the Roberts Six on the Supreme Court, I bid you a hearty FUCK YOU.