My name is Tad Lonnerman and I'm a millennial.

These days that sounds like an apology, but it's not. I hate that word and all the baggage it brings. Problems are problems, and we all have them. A father we never knew. A mother who barely remembers her name. A debt well into five figures. I turn twenty-five years old today and share an apartment with my little brother Derek because he's all I have left. So don't talk to me about being a whiny, spoiled brat.

About the only problem I don't have is my job. I'm an associate programmer in the game industry. Kinda bucked the unemployment trend on that one, didn't I? It's a dream job and I've been treading water for two years, focusing on nothing but being good at what I do and supporting me and Derek.

And it was working. Portlandia: the beautiful Pacific Northwest. This was where everything turned right for me, even with all the rain. A solid paycheck. A challenging career. I finally had it made.

So why was everything so bland?

Here I was, on my birthday, stuck in rush hour traffic in a snowstorm. Rain I could deal with. Portland's a nice town but all the hills and highways run through endless bottlenecks. Snow shuts everything down. It gave me plenty of time to ponder being twenty-five.

My conclusion? What a crappy milestone. Sixteen gets you behind the wheel. Eighteen makes you an adult. Twenty-one's party time. What did I get now?

A lower deductible for car insurance. Watch out, ladies.

Yup. Mid twenties. Might as well be thirty. Kill me now.

It's ironic how the harshest measures of life happen on birthdays. To be fair, it wasn't just weather and existential angst. My small boutique game studio had been acquired by a soulless mega-conglomerate named Kablammy Games some time ago. They didn't care about game mechanics or design, they cared about monetization and data mining. And making endless sequels and clones. And focus testing the crap out of good ideas until only the most sanitary leftovers remained.

Kablammy had so many branches and divisions it was impossible to get anything done. Two years of plucky grit making a name for myself and I was suddenly lost in a sea of middle managers and request forms. And don't get me started on the number of mandatory meetings. It was one such useless meeting I was late to already. Today we'd probably strategize methods of charging gamers extra money for regular game content. Sorry, the princess is in another castle; please pay $9.99 to access it.

I huffed and flicked on my blinker. Eager to get out of traffic, I turned up an empty side street sloping up a hill. Don't worry, my hatred of the snow left me anything but unprepared. I had proper chains on my tires to battle my nemesis. With the absolute weight of the world on my mind, my compact car steadily scaled the icy road.

Dying isn't like those Final Destination movies. Gory, yes. Inexplicable, sure. But it's not fated. A series of events don't collude to kill you.

Death isn't noble like all the stories shoveled out of Hollywood either. It's not a meaningful sacrifice that forever changes the rest of the world for the better.

Death is a fucking Pepsi tractor trailer driving down an icy road and swerving headlong into your Nissan Altima.

That's it. No meaning. No purpose.

It's random.

I laid on my horn but the semi was out of control. Dumbass didn't even have chains on his tires. I tried to pull off the narrow road but there simply wasn't anywhere to go and the truck was determined to hog both lanes.

As the Pepsi truck slid inevitably closer, all I could think about was if my insurance deductible would reflect my twenty-five-year-old discount.