Well, it’s Christmas Eve, Outposters. This means only one thing. That after we have all got tomorrow out of the way, we can start thinking about next year’s vacation!
I have two children under 12 years old, so, inevitably, thoughts drift to the potential of a Disney vacation to Florida. Even living on this impoverished prison camp of an island under Supreme Leader Keir Starmer, I reckon I might get a travel pass from his politburo as long as I don’t post any hurty words online, and my people’s tractor factory meets its quota.
Or at least I could, if I wanted to sell one of my children to some kind of financier with their own island in order to fund it because, fuck me sideways, it is expensive these days.
It seems a Disney vacation budget is less “budget” and more “venture capital.” One-day passes at Walt Disney World have been topping out near $199–$209 per park on high-demand dates.
That’s before you add on the Park Hopper option, which itself can approach $280+ for a single day. Parking is upwards of $40 a day in most parks. When I went back in the 1990s it was free!
And let’s not forget multi-day tickets, hotel stays, food, Genie+ fees, merchandise, and the optional enhanced experience add-ons that collectively make spending time at Disney feel like funding a minor indie film. Scribbling down costs as I have been researching this potential vacation, I am already at $15,000 and rising. It seems “magic” is expensive.
So it costs a “luxury” amount, but a theme park vacation should never be a luxury experience. It should be a family event.
For this amount of money, genuinely, I could fly business class to the Maldives and spend two weeks in a five-star, all-inclusive resort. In fact, for this amount, I could buy a pretty decent second-hand family car.
Make it make sense!
This cost must be driven by something more than central banks printing money to inflate away their debts while destroying your net worth and putting their own life on expenses. In the course of looking into this vacation option, I think I have found at least some of the answers. I have been forced to confront the horror that is…
The Disney Adult
Here they are: adults who will not only choose this expense, but then create entire Instagram feeds, trip reports, and life philosophies around maximizing their Disney experience and making sure that you know all about it.
If you’ve spent more than five minutes online anywhere that isn’t directly affiliated with the Walt Disney Company, you have felt them: the pulsing, earnest tide of the Disney Adult. They are a nebulous swirl of mid-life ennui, fast-food-themed brain chemistry, and a pocketful of mouse ears that they refuse to take off.
These are adults – actual functional adults – who have arrived at the unsettling conclusion that adult life, in all its existential complexity, is best managed by spending every free minute planning, attending, and Instagramming a week in a claustrophobia-inducing queue at Walt Disney World.
Let’s be clear: we are not talking about parents taking their kids to a theme park. That’s normal, wholesome, and involves at least one sane person in the family. No, we are talking about grownups who post brain-rotting shite online like:
“Home is Where the Mouse Is!”
For fucks sake, Sandra, you are a 39-year-old logistics manager at a pump manufacturing company in Wisconsin. Your stay at the Contemporary Resort with a monorail outside your bedroom window is not a substitute for a personality!
Off she goes every year, with her mentally abused husband in tow, to wear her Mickey ears in public like a badge of poor mental health. They accessorise these headpieces with the intensity of a medieval knight polishing his chain mail. They own dozens, glitter ones, holiday ones, ‘I Survived Seven Dwarfs Queue’ ones, matching his-and-hers pajama ones. They have ears with motivational quotes printed on the band.
It starts at the airport, clutching a giant suitcase while proudly wearing their ears so you know where they are going on vacation, hoping they have enough therapy to last them over their time away from home.
A real, functioning human being might wear a hat, but the Disney Adult wears a head-mounted billboard celebrating their own arrested development.
“Queues Are My Spirit Animal”
Your average Disney Adult doesn’t merely stand in line for attractions. They luxuriate in it like a spa day, and then they document it. They post about it. They blog about optimal queue hydration strategies. They consult online threads on how best to time the FastPass/Lightning Lane/Genie+ or whatever the fuck Disney is calling the premium line-jumping system this week.
Ad infinitum, they debate the arcane merits of ride queue optimization like it is quantum physics.
Need to plan a conversation topic that won’t be met by eye-rolling? Try bringing up something other than attraction wait times. It’s like asking a cat to prepare a PHD thesis: they might try, but it will be aggressively wrong.
Speaking of queueing, remember this extended meditation on waiting isn’t happening in some cheap amusement park backwoods. Remember those ticket prices. They are paying hundreds of dollars to stand in a queue and then talk about it online!
Now imagine spending half a lifetime’s worth of disposable income, and all your annual leave, to stand in these queues, snapping selfies with minimum wage employees dressed as cartoon characters who have exactly zero fucks to give that you’ve renamed your Kindle “GoofyDreams” for this trip.
This is the emotional state of a Disney Adult: joyless waiting, monetised nostalgia, and personal validation measured in MagicBands.
So you think you might need a strategy to get around the theme parks and spend as little time as possible among these fuckwits. This is where things get even worse. You will encounter the digital warzone that is the Disney Adult passive-aggressive planning threads.
This is because nothing excites the emotionally fragile heart of a Disney Adult like their participation in a holiday planning thread. These discussions are a vortex of passive-aggressive nonsense, where people will genuinely spend hours snippily discussing whether staying at Value Resort X will ruin their entire vacation and personally offend Mickey Mouse himself if they do it. Expect sentences like:
“Well, if you’re actually trying to make memories, you need Park Hopper, but only at rope drop on days with forecasted queue times under 45 minutes.”
Yes, Debbie, we know that everyone else, even in your HR department at work, hates you, and owning several EPCOT mugs with your own face on somehow helps you validate your own pointless existence, but thanks for the advice.
These threads are a minefield of micro-hierarchies, nuanced moral judgments about Genie+ purchases, and people sincerely offended if you suggest, even hypothetically, that Universal Studios exists. For the Disney Adult, it does not. It is a myth. A cursed land where people aren’t wearing ears.
A Mental Health Emergency With Fireworks
At the very pinnacle of this strange phenomenon, you will find Disney Adults who will tell you that Disney theme parks are their “spiritual home.” You’ll see phrasing like “The happiest place on Earth healed my soul” earnestly posted by someone whose last real vacation was to a spa retreat in Monterrey in 2012, but is now somewhere in Florida at a resort where the most magical moment usually involves paying extra to see a princess wave at you for three minutes.
Let’s dissect this: they believe that walking around in 95°F humidity, dodging giant strollers, and trying to time their sunscreen re-application between Lightning Lane purchase windows is good for their psyche.
If the combination of extreme marketing, endless queues, and anthropomorphised plastic creatures genuinely functions for them as emotional sustenance, then sure, we can mock it. But we must also silently pity the psyche that can’t find spiritual nourishment outside a corporate entertainment complex.
In the grand theatre of human behavior, the Disney Adult is a tragicomic figure: simultaneously a devoted fan, a deep pocket for entertainment conglomerates, and a cautionary exhibit on how nostalgia and corporate branding can fill emotional gaps that might have been better served by, say, friends, hobbies, or hobbies that don’t involve queueing for three straight hours to hug a giant cartoon mouse.
At the end of the day, we can laugh, deeply and uncomfortably, but we also hold out faint hope that the Disney Adult will one day unplug their MagicBands, remove the ears, and maybe – just maybe – find a spiritual home that doesn’t need a queue and a military-grade strategic plan to conquer it. Or at least they’ll invest in therapy that doesn’t require a FastPass.
Fuck it. I am going to the Maldives in case this shit is contagious.
