(YOUR NAME HERE)’S STORY
1. You were born into this life with no control over where you were born,
to whom you were born, or in what social and economic conditions you were
born. You couldn’t decide to stay in the
womb rather than being thrust out into the world naked and screaming, and once
you were born, you pretty much were handed a dealt deck in terms of your genetic
make-up and your environment. If you
were very lucky, you weren’t born in a war zone or to abusive parents or with a
life-threatening disability or mentally incapacitated.
2. For approximately 18-25 years of your life, you grew physically and
developed, to a greater or lesser degree, the intellectual, psychological, and
social skills needed to navigate your way through life and find your place
within human society.
3. For much of the rest of your life, you put the skills you learned to
use working in some kind of job—in all likelihood, one that you didn’t enjoy
very much or that didn’t pay you the kind of salary that you thought you
deserved. The money that you earned from
working, however, enabled you eventually to leave your parent’s home and pay
for those items necessary for survival (food, clothing, housing) and those that
contribute to human felicity (cars, Iphones, designer handbags, etc,).
4. Like all animals, you have a built-in desire to procreate and to spread
your gene pool as widely as possible to ensure the survival of the
species. If conditions were right, you
may have found a suitable partner with whom to produce offspring. You then spent the most productive years
of your mid-life providing for those offspring, attempting to ensure their
survival into adulthood, and training them—with greater or lesser success—to become
autonomous individuals in their own right.
5. If you were lucky, you didn’t die accidentally, perish from a disease,
or be killed, and made it into old age.
At that point your body began to break down, you got sick, you suffered
physically (and perhaps emotionally as well) and eventually died. Within moments after your death, your body
began to decompose, and within a few years, almost nothing was left of you at
all.
6. Within one or two generations of your death, you were forgotten by
every other human being on the planet (unless you were one of the ridiculously small
percentage of human beings who were skillful or lucky enough to make an impact
on human history, in which case, you might be remembered a bit longer). Your grandchildren will probably only have
fleeting memories of you and their children will only know who you were through
dusty, old photographs that have been left behind (if they haven’t already been
tossed away by a careless descendant, that is).
7. With a relatively short amount of time—planetarily speaking—humanity
itself will be destroyed through some kind of global cataclysm or pandemic and nothing
will remain of our species. At some
point in time a new species may evolve from the bugs that have managed to
survive, but this species will probably have little or nothing in common with
our own. Eventually, the planet, and even
the universe itself, will simply cease to exist, and all that will remain will
be the infinite void.
If there’s anything important that I’m leaving out of this
narrative, or if you think that what I’ve written about the human condition is
not universally applicable, please feel free to set me straight.
