Tick, Tock
After months of planning, you make an enormous insider trade just before the markets close. You book a celebratory trip to go vineyard shopping in Bordeaux, but then a call comes in from your wealth management advisor. It turns out your personal assistant forgot to reset your clocks after Daylight Savings and you made the trade an hour early. The market caught on, costing you millions. You have to settle for retirement in Malibu, like a peasant.
The Neighbor
Millennials stop spending all their money on 15-minute pour overs and complicated avocado toast and instead begin investing in PotCoin. Freed from the shackles of poor financial habits, they ascend into the upper class and permeate your gated community. You are forced to fall asleep to the cinematic soundscape of God of War being blasted through your new neighbor’s Dolby Atmos surround sound system.
Someone’s Crying in the Cellar
The world comes to the consensus that expensive wine is overrated. Your fully-stocked, 1,500-square-foot wine cellar loses its monetary and status value, crippling your sense of self-worth. You descend into your cellar, take a swig from a bottle of 1921 Château Margaux, and weep as you arrive at the deflating realization that the world is absolutely right.
The Mutilated Man
On a Saturday filled with exceptionally potent existential dread, you decide to fill your underutilized hot tub with caviar. This leads to an unintended reenactment of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. You suffer a minor talon wound, which serves as a convenient pretense for a third round of plastic surgery. The result is anything but an improvement.
The Incident in the Harbor
While cruising around the bay in your 60′ yacht, you experience an intense interaction between the handful of Ambien and Xanax you took earlier that morning. You try to cry for help from your crew, but thanks to the Ambien, you end up shouting racial slurs through the boat’s loudspeaker. You lose control of the vessel and crash into the breakwater at 30 knots.
Contact
While en route to pick you up for a weekend getaway to Nantucket, your NetJets plane collides with a flock of migrating geese and goes down in flames. For the first time in your life, you have to fly commercial. A man in your security line wearing cargo shorts and Crocs asks you for the time and you collapse from a blood pressure spike.
The Transformation
Due to a new Harvard policy, your youngest son is unable to coast in on the coattails of a new building contribution. He ends up attending Reed, where he tries psilocybin and becomes enamored with the intricacies of West African ritual dance. Left with no other choice, you disown him to save face at Pebble Beach.
Out of Time
You take an afternoon stroll over to the East Hampton Rolex dealer to look for a new timepiece. The sales associate walks you through every model. In horror, you realize that you own every Rolex on the market. There are none left to buy. You spontaneously combust into a cloud of gold flakes.