The Inconvenience of Life
I think we can all agree that life … isn't without its inconveniences.
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The Full Text
Life, it seems, is not without its inconveniences.
For some people, the inconveniences are as simple as they are troubling. Like ... discovering they’re out of milk after they’ve already poured a bowl of Frosted Flakes or … coming up a nickel short when trying to get a soda out of the machine -- wait, who uses nickels?
Nevermind. Simple inconveniences. Like ... maybe even discovering that the mother you cherished so dearly isn’t really your mother but, in fact, a mutant slime-ball from the planet Sigma-8 who just so happens to have a particularly convincing human skin for which it can ooze into right before kissing you goodnight.
These inconveniences -- simple or troubling as they are -- on the whole, are minor when compared to the greatest inconvenience of all.
Life.
It is understandable that this concept -- life itself as an inconvenience -- can potentially be difficult to comprehend. After all, it’s ... what we DO. The very point of life is to LIVE. How can such an essential part of the human condition possibly be an inconvenience?
The journey of that human condition -- of life itself -- passes through five major milestones: conception; birth; the growth and learning phase; the phase where everyone wonders what the point of it all is; and then, finally, death. At which point life ceases to be.
For some ... very unfortunate individuals ... the inconvenience of life starts right at birth. When a baby emerges from its mother, it is through the act of “moving on” -- passing on, going to that proverbial “better place,” er, “other place” -- that the baby realizes how good it had it in the womb. It didn’t have to eat. It didn’t have to bother with all this breathing stuff. It didn’t have all these giant creatures hovering around it, assaulting its senses with a virtually endless loop of incomprehensible sounds, smells, and absurd facial contortions. On the whole, back when it was still in the womb, the fetus got to lie about all day long, in a state of perpetual peace and doing literally nothing.
Think about that the next time you see a baby crying.
Interestingly, there’s also an incredibly small amount of people who experience the inconvenience of life right at the moment of conception. This is exceedingly rare, usually only occurring during sentient reincarnations (whereupon an individual is aware of its imminent return to existence). In these extraordinarily infrequent events, the freshly conceived is imbued with a sudden, overwhelming sense of all the pain, suffering, and general unhappiness it will experience in its eventual lifetime. At which point they generally think, “Oh, God. Not again.”
Of course, the majority of the inconvenience of life is experienced during that Fourth Phase of Life where people kind of are just bumbling about, wondering what the point of it all is. These people can’t help but be reminded of those good ol’ times before birth -- before they first entered the world -- when they had nothing to do, no expectations of them, and simply had to lie around all day and generally do nothing.
And even the mere thought of how great life was back in the womb immediately takes this person wallowing in existential dread all the way back to conception when they didn’t even have to lie around in the first place.
That ... was freedom.
Finally, and most extraordinary of all of life’s inconveniences, is when our intrepid hero has trudged through every single one of the required milestones of existence, done the best they could with the bleak reality thrust upon them, managed to make themselves happy and successful -- or some facsimile thereof -- and, satisfied with their accomplishments and play through of this life, finally ... fortunately ... blissfully ... dies.
And then comes back.
That can be the greatest inconvenience of all.
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