Introspection is a mind-altering substance. Introspection while on a mind-altering substance is a dark and sinister thing. You feel like you're alone in a labyrinth, with only a thin line clutched in your hands to guide you back to reality, and a minotaur lurking somewhere in the suffocating walls of the maze, ready to devour you like a Mahi Roll at the local sushi place.
Life is a bewildering blur for a young man going from a shitty situation in life, a childhood not worth remembering, a yawn-inducing adolescence, to something completely alien to him: feeling like he has become the man he always wanted to become. This young man is someone who spends twenty years of his life wishing he could be somebody, and when he finally becomes that somebody, he has no idea how to handle it. He spent too much time wishing, and not enough time actually planning things out as though they might actually happen.
He welcomes the never-ending conveyor belt of problems in adult life, because it makes him feel like an adult, and not some pudgy teenager hiding in his bedroom, wondering when he'll need to start shaving. Paying bills, opening up bank accounts, scheduling doctor's appointments, worrying about taxes --- he drops these problems into daily conversation, because it makes him feel like a grown-up.
But he feels more regret than anything else: part of him wishes he could regress, hang out forever with his stoner friends from high school, instead of fleeing to the sanctuary of grown-up life. The problems these days are far more abstract than he's used to dealing with. He's not broke. He's not friendless. He has a degree, and some sort of marketable skills that will land him an acceptable job, until he feels the urge to move on at some point in the unforeseeable future. He's not working 40 hours a week while trying to keep awake in class the next morning. Life, by any objective tallying, is good.
But he's lonely and bewildered. He has no idea where he'll be in ten years: it could be across the country, it could be in an entirely different country. For all he knows, he could be dead or in jail. The strutting young man in him puts on a wall of reserve and calculation, but deep down, he still wishes he were still in his senior year of high school, when everything was certain and you didn't need to exert any effort to maintain the illusion.
Life is distractingly complicated. He's afraid that if it gets any more complicated than this, he'll be so gawk-eyed in wonder that he loses track of everything. Work is boring. Women are complicated and beautiful. One woman in particular. School is almost over, laughably easy, and the degree is in the mail. Work is exciting again, because his boss is relying on him now. And the present and the foreseeable future are gratifyingly hard, and that's his insurance policy against inattention.
What will happen if life gets easy, and he stops paying attention? What will happen when he gets the wife, kids and mortgage he feels he's supposed to want? He prays it will never happen, and goes to bed.