Dear financially independent recent grad,

You inspire and shame me with your financial autonomy. The Internet, which must know that your parents do not pay for your phone bill, should reward you for your 4G independence.

I hope you post throwback photos on Wednesdays with no social media pushback. I hope Taylor Swift gives you random, wise advice on Tumblr, and that you never forget to cancel your Amazon Prime free trial before they charge you for the whole year. I even hope you use the Hefe filter for an Instagram of an old barn outside of Austin with the caption “#NoFilter” and get away with it—you deserve it.

You deserve so much. Maybe you don’t come from a middle-class background that allows for privileged millennial dependency. Maybe you majored in something practical in college like accounting or computer programming (but if you started a lucrative porn site that further promotes and fetishizes the patriarchy, I’m excluding you from this letter). Maybe you even went to a liberal arts school and majored in film studies or creative writing but you gave up on your dreams just in time to pay your first phone bill.

Perhaps you don’t even have a smartphone because they are too expensive. (How expensive? Don’t ask me.) If you are in fact a dumbphone user, I hope it is not the sliding kind—or worse, the touch-screen kind that gives the mere illusion of Internet access.

Let it be a flip phone.

Let the satisfying, resounding click that your flip phone makes as you end each tele-conversation sound like a door closing on your adolescent parasitism. I hope the smallness of your phone in your pocket leaves room for layers upon layers of dollar bills.

But most of all, I hope you revel in this flip phone’s durability—that you literally throw it into the air, over the heads of your friends who are living below the taxable income, above the dining room router that you’re not taking advantage of, right up next to the ceiling where your financial stability and moral superiority rightfully reside.

In awe,
Jenna

P.S. You registered for Obamacare without even calling your parents for help, didn’t you? Didn’t you.