It’s Not A Terrible Life

A hundred years ago, if you didn’t have some source of heat in the winter, you died. That’s not allowed to happen now. If it does, the people responsible are generally punished. Despite what you might have been told, justice is served here about as well as it can be in a polity of over a quarter of a billion people.

You can make contact with friends or family (or strangers), almost anywhere in the world, practically in seconds. You can see other parts of the globe without leaving your home office; you can do it from your phone. You probably possess a hand-held device that does things that would be incomprehensible fantasy a century ago.

Even if you can’t prepare your own food, you can still eat. You won’t starve to death if you can’t or don’t want to hunt. There are places that will give you food so you won’t have to steal it. That’s not so bad, eh?

It’s not a terrible life.

There are so many choices of snack food, entire aisles of grocery stores are devoted to them. Competing brands offer the same flavors. You have various options in the creation of popcorn, a foodstuff upon which no human being can subsist. Speaking of which, there’s still a plethora of variations of gum, even though no one chews it anymore because it sounds revolting while wearing earbuds.

Didn’t notice that, did you? Folks don’t snap gum and listen to music with earbuds at the same time. It’s either/or. Silver linings and all that, I guess. On the subject of earbuds; they’re smaller than any of your toes, and they pipe audio directly into your ear canals. In what reality is that not astounding? When I was a kid, I used to put my head against the speaker. Think about the advancements in headphones just over the past few years. It certainly paid off when everybody had to telecommunicate for work, this past summer.

Silver linings. Every cloud has one.

Here’s a big one; you don’t have to make your own clothes. Sure, the option exists, but you can also acquire from the zillions of clothes already made. Some clothes cost next to nothing; some are actually given away. You won’t have to fear the loss of your dignity, when you’re at your weakest, or when you can’t take care of yourself. There are people who will step in and help, for no other reason than to do so.

There are far more good people than bad. Billions more. It’s not a terrible life.

How about this. I could be wrong, but I bet you have garments between your pants, shoes and skin. You have socks to cushion your feet inside your sneakers, and you have underpants to shield your privates from the zipper of your trousers. That’s called “an advantage”. Even if you don’t have a parent or spouse to launder your underthings, you still have them. You probably don’t have to sleep in the clothes you worked all day wearing. You probably do have a safe way to wash your body, in a private place. People whose lives are actually terrible enjoy none of those things.

Odds are solid that you’ll never freeze to death in your home, or suffocate from carbon monoxide poisoning. If you have the money, you can buy yourself enough liquor to drown in, and no one will stop you. You can rent a car, lie about not using it to mow down a crowd of people, and then use it to mow down a crowd of people. Depending upon who you are, you may not even be punished for it. You can lie in court that it wasn’t you, and get away with it. It’s presumed that you won’t lie before God, but get a load of this; you don’t have to even believe in God. You don’t have to believe in shit.

Everything you know about other people is what you have been shown or told by those people, or their enemies. You have no greater understanding of others than they do of you. You are afforded the opportunity to develop feelings regarding persons and institutions that you will never encounter face-to-face, and that will never be aware of your existence.

If you want to hear a song, you type the title and artist into a search engine and in under ten seconds you’re hearing it. That’s not anything in the same universe as suffering. Infinite selection at your fingertips is called decadence. Congratulations; you enjoy a cushier life than any ancestor who preceded you. You utter opinions, and you aren’t thrown into prison for them. You kid about treason, and no one guillotines you, or burns you alive. You might even be working a job that basically enslaves you, while training you in nothing other than what that particular job requires.

That still doesn’t make it a terrible life.

We currently find ourselves surrounded by persons who have never endured consequences for any action. Children raised by parents terrified of punishing them, educated in schools terrified of offending them, grown into ersatz adults for whom nothing exists but the present. There are entire colonies of livestreamers, who are paid small sums of money to abuse themselves or others. I’m not even talking about Russia; I mean here in America, we have degenerate vloggers who scream “nigger” at black people, or randomly assault passersby with mace. When rebuked, these surveillant simpletons either cry, or shriek that no one is permitted to touch them. Their donors are only interested in causing the livestreamer’s death or injury, which appears clearly deserved.

You probably had no idea about any of that. It could be because it tends to happen in cities in New York or California from which all people who can have fled. Or, it could be because your life is so not terrible, the entire mess seems made up and unbelievable. Which it might as well be; it’ll never go anywhere, or succeed as anything but a cautionary tale.

It’s not a terrible life. The ones claiming it is, are the ones you can’t save. They want to break you down and abuse you. Whether or not they prevail is entirely up to you. They only get their hooks in your flesh if you expose it to them.

So don’t let them. The key is the belief that you’re right, and they’re wrong. And when people are wrong, the only solution lies with them, not you. It’s not your job to save anyone who doesn’t want to be saved. Their life is terrible because they made it that way. They believed they were right, and they weren’t, and they know it in some small way, but it’s too late to save face. They’re wedded to the Lie, until death.

You aren’t. You can still see the good in other people, even now. You can see that life is wonderful; beautiful, in fact. You are a fiber in the vast tapestry of existence; lives, energies, emotions and feelings, all interwoven, extending into eternity. You are encircled by a world of nature that will thrive more so after your passing than before you began. You are present at a time in humanity wherein it is possible to be aware of all this, and more.

It’s not a terrible life.