At the age of 14, Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown has been named as one of world’s 100 Most Influential people by Time Magazine, august chronicler of prestige and watcher of Netflix. Brown bests activist Malala Yousafzai, who was first named to the list at the age of 16, by a good two years—to say nothing of your own kid, who has yet to be recognized as one of the most impactful humans on Earth, despite having plenty of time to do so. Look at them now: Eating your food, destroying your social life, demanding your constant attention without even so much as becoming a globally recognized icon of precocious strength and poise whose achievements have already earned the admiration of professional peers twice their age and served as a source of inspiration to children the world over. God, your kid sucks.
“She may have been 12 in years, but her spirit and mind were timeless,” actor Aaron Paul writes in Time of his first encounter with Brown. “A wise woman was speaking from her cherubic face… She somehow understands the human experience as if she has lived it for a thousand years.” It’s the sort of glowing testimonial that captures why Brown has become one of the world’s fastest-rising stars, and the kind of that thing that Aaron Paul would never, ever say about your kid.
Oof, can you even imagine how embarrassed you would be if your kid were to have their own chance meeting with Aaron Paul, then they tried to describe the human condition with the empathy and sagacity of a Gaia masked beneath their sticky little kid flesh? They’d blow it! Oh man how they’d blow it! Their attempts to speak from the Jungian collective unconscious and impart its eternal wisdom to the beloved Breaking Bad star would be so fucking clumsy and immature in comparison, you’d hardly be able to stand it. They wouldn’t even have their own, admittedly lesser streaming series to excuse their ignorance. They could at least be on Everything Sucks!, for fuck’s sake. Why’d you even have kids, anyway? They’re not influencing shit!
Anyway, Brown joins the rest of Time’s Most Influential 2018 list alongside honorees such as Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Cardi B, Guillermo del Toro, Greta Gerwig, and Hugh Jackman. Your kid still has a few years to do something more important than Hugh Jackman, we guess. Console yourself with that.