Umbrellas are terrible, annoying, and impractical devices of minimal utility to the human race, and here’s why the world should get rid of them and switch to the infinitely superior raincoat model of rain protection.

1. They make every doorway a gigantic pain in the ass.

Firstly, there’s the struggle of having to open and close them as you go in and out- if you’re outside going in, this means you must either put down your umbrella outside and expose yourself to the rain (defeating the whole fucking purpose), or try to navigate the door while holding the umbrella (awkward) and then fold it away inside. This is an awkward process that gets water everywhere and possibly on other people (or, if you don’t shake it off at all, then it’ll just drip everywhere you go). If you’re going out, then you either have to open your umbrella outside (again, defeating the whole point of a fucking umbrella), or open it inside and once again face the struggle of awkwardly navigating a door while holding an umbrella (and you also risk being cursed with bad luck for opening it inside). Not only this, but if there’s any kind of crowd, then you have to try to not hit other people as you do all this or get water on them, and they might be doing the same thing, putting you in danger of getting stabbed in the face or soaked (again defeating the purpose of the damn thing).

If you just wore a raincoat instead, you know what you’d do? You’d put your fucking hood up and you go. Absolutely no consideration of this agonizing, useless, difficult, anxiety-inducing process would have to perturb your thoughts.

2. They make doing things harder- especially walking.

Imagine I gave you something that was supposed to make your life easier, and then I told you whenever you used it it would be like having one hand amputated. Sound useful? I don’t think so. Not only is it harder to use your hands (texting, buying things, carrying food, just to name a few), but the umbrella also projects a threat zone around you that turns walking from an easy way to get around into an adrenaline-loaded nightmare full of potential lawsuits (if your umbrella stabs someone else in the face) or a lifetime of crippling medical bills (if someone else’s umbrella stabs you in the face). Maybe if you lived in Bumfuck Nowhere, WY, where you don’t have to worry about literally anyone else walking by, an umbrella would be slightly more useful to you.

However, we live in New York fucking City, and there’s always a million assholes doing dumb shit in close proximity whenever you’re walking, so clearly umbrellas just represent an unacceptable degree of risk and danger. And as some sort of sadistic bonus, they also limit your visual field, so you can detect neither approaching threats nor potential victims (or even just friends waving hi or sale signs in random stores or whatever).

If you wear a raincoat, you can carry your shit and use your hands, you don’t have to worry about putting out someone’s eye or leaving them with Tyrion-esque facial scars, and you can actually see your surroundings (well enough to, say, dodge any umbrella-wielding maniacs intent on mutilating your face).

3. They are WEAK. 

Umbrellas break all the fucking time. Dropped it and broke some delicate little spring mechanism? Broken. Banged it against a wall as you were jostled by a crowd of people whose umbrellas you were trying to keep from putting out your eyes, and broke one of those ridiculous little folding struts that helps it unfold? Broken. Wind, ever? Broken as fuck. When shit gets real, umbrellas cannot take the heat and they will abandon you and crack under the pressure. A raincoat never leaves its wearer behind like that.

Wind also ties into my next point…

4. They just don’t work very well, ever.

Somewhere out there, millions of light-years from Earth, there’s probably a planet where surface winds aren’t a thing and it only rains straight down.

However, for those of us who apparently haven’t gotten the memo, WE DON’T FUCKING LIVE THERE. We live on Earth, in windy-ass New York, where usually whatever is falling from the sky, whether it be rain or snow or pigeon shit, is coming at you sideways as well as from above (and the direction is going to shift every half-block). Not only will your weak-ass umbrella fold like a house of cards in the face of anything more than a light summer zephyr, even if it does somehow stand up and give you its noblest effort, it just isn’t designed to protect you from attacks from multiple quarters.

5. They look ridiculous.

You look dumb carrying an umbrella. They are objectively just silly-looking devices. I don’t care how expensive it was or what color it is, you look dumb and that won’t change no matter how many times you tell yourself it’s a “nice accessory” or whatever the fuck it is that helps you sleep at night. Frankly the more ~eXtRa~ it is, the stupider it looks, because it’s clear you’re aware of your own foolishness at least enough that you felt the need to waste more money to try and look better- but the problem isn’t which umbrella you bought, it’s that you’re a human being carrying a fucking fabric dome at the end of stick.

Are raincoats going to turn you into a fashion icon? No, but at least you won’t look like an idiot.

6. The umbrella’s demented ideology warps your soul and your priorities.

Much as skyscrapers express our species’ underlying phallic obsessions and insecurities on a grand scale, the umbrella distills many of our deepest neuroses. Its shield-like form, directed not at an enemy spearman as in the days of yore, but towards the sky itself, expresses a defiance of nature whose hubris can hardly be overstated. It may be made to look like the roofs of the buildings that do effectively shield us from precipitation, and to enclose us in a similar bubble of pseudo-internal space, but the fact is that it just isn’t. You can’t carry a building or the concept of the indoors with you everywhere you go, and trying to do so is just an exercise in futility. If you’re going outside in a rainstorm, you’re going to get a little bit wet (especially if you’re using an umbrella, thanks to the myriad aforementioned design flaws).

But the umbrella’s symbolic form and the way people confidently brandish it almost like a weapon seem to defy this basic fact- and indeed, in this defiance of nature and reason, we can see the root of many of the present problems and anxieties that torment our society. If people have engaged in the mass delusion that they can completely avoid getting wet in a rainstorm, or that they can separate themselves from their natural environment wherever they are, then climate apathy or outright denial is hardly a huge leap. This overconfidence and hubris also seeps into other facets of people’s lives. I ask you, would a culture that was not fully in thrall to the diseased, satanic cult of the umbrella have marched confidently into Afghanistan (a country people have literally called “the Graveyard of Empires” for thousands of years) not two decades after we watched another superpower bleed itself white there?

You’re going out in the rain. You’re going to get a little damp. Just accept that- your goal should be to minimize the damage, and for that, a raincoat is your best bet.

In conclusion, it’s time to cast aside this useless, dangerous, poisonous device. Grab your raincoats. The time of the umbrella must come to an end.