It goes without saying that the coronavirus pandemic has completely changed all of our lives and what our day to day looks like. It’s safe to assume that we’re more than ready to kick the vast majority of these New Normals to the curb and go back to doing things like, I dunno, standing closer to someone than six feet or even indulging in the occasional high-five, and a very, very slim percentage of these pandemic changes will be missed. Having the luxury of working from home AKA not putting on real pants every day has been nice.
There is one thing that has become normalized during the pandemic, however, that we as a collective society need to pull the plug on immediately. And that thing is puzzles.
It can be hard to try and find new ways to fill the time through month after month of lockdowns, I get it, I do. But that is no reason to resort to willfully doing a puzzle, as if it’s fun, as if doing a puzzle is somehow an enjoyable activity. Puzzles suck. They suck ass and we all know it. Why have we been pretending otherwise? Why have we been lying to ourselves? To our children? No. No more. This has gone on long enough.
Puzzles, from start to finish, are a scam.
Step one, you buy a puzzle with your hard earned money. Step two, you stare at the pieces dumped on your coffee table going, “Uhhhhhh where’s the blue piece? No that’s the wrong blue piece. That’s the wrong blue piece. That’s the wrong b—” etcetera for hours, even days. Step three, eventually you finish the puzzle and discover that, surprise surprise, it’s exactly the picture it told you it was going to be. Now what? Now you do it all over again?
Excuse me?
Do you know how insane that is?!
No. Nope.
I would rather mow a golf course by cutting each blade of grass with nail scissors. That isn’t an activity, that is a form of torment that belongs in the dungeons of Tartarus. The only thing more psychotic than subjecting yourself to completing a puzzle over and over is completing it once and then keeping it. Does it do anything cool like after you finish building a model plane? No, you just stare at it, because it’s a puzzle. Okay. Cool. So you have the picture on the front of the box framed and on display, except it doesn’t even look like the picture on the box, it looks like shit because it’s a fucking puzzle.
Go buy a desk from IKEA and spend your free time putting it together and taking it apart, since we’re doing things that don’t make any sense. At least whenever you decide you’re finally done you’d have a goddamn desk.
Look, all I’m saying is that you deserve better. Choosing to spend your time doing puzzles is like if the Donner Party still had rations but some guy was like, “Alright who are we eating first?” NO. STOP. There are OPTIONS. Getting into claymation or puppetry would be a less depressing and better use of quarantine downtime. Say no to puzzles.