Everyone’s seen those posters: “Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.â€? You know, Share Your Toys, Say Nice Things, No Hitting, Listen to the Teacher, No Tattling. They say, in their fake crayoned-on words, that these rules apply to us even today.

I wonder what the lives of people who spend their time making inspirational posters are like. Do they have to think about the same things everyone else does, day after day? Or are their lives full of clichés, just like the propaganda they crank out to make the rest of us feel insufficient?

I don’t think they realized, when they wrote those posters, that yeah, those rules still apply to us all. But it’s not all so black-and-white, so easy to understand as it was in kindergarten.