The average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty in the morning feeling just plain terrible.

The sentence satirizes the myth of the perfectly functional adult. By piling up approving descriptors—“average, healthy, well-adjusted”—Kerr invokes a social ideal, then undercuts it with the blunt admission that such a person still wakes up “feeling just plain terrible.” The humor comes from the collision between public standards and private sensation: normal life includes discomfort, reluctance, and low-grade misery that self-help language can’t erase. Implicitly, the line offers consolation through recognition: if even the model adult feels awful at 7:30 a.m., then morning misery is not a personal failure but a common human condition.