I’m One In A Million

“What is the nature of existence?” no one asked me.

“You asked,” I replied. “So I’ll tell you…”

Imagine being born into a society. Congratulations! You were the sperm that won. (Unless the fertilization process was technologically interfered with and/or took place inside of a test tube. In that case, here’s your “participant” ribbon.)

For most of thus that’s exactly what happened. We came into existence and then, presumably sometime later, we attained some sort of consciousness. And without knowing what we were doing we began to absorb. Mostly from the idiots who surrounded us.

Nice plan. Now you’re totally fucked.

Now imagine you find yourself in a group of 100 people. 99 of them are likeminded about something utterly idiotic. You, the lone wolf on the outside looking in, somehow don’t agree with the norms. Even though they are the only norms you have ever known.

Are you automatically nuts? Or the only one who has figured out something that is significant? Perhaps even the only person of all time to actually make sense of it all.

Maybe the culture believes that once a year a lucky “volunteer” gets his/her head cracked open and their brains used for a communal sorbet feast. Somehow it became a known “fact” that this increases the intelligence of the non-delicious survivors.

Or, perhaps, the living is hard and food extremely difficult to come by. And the brainiacs you call your brethren have decided that 50% of all food production must go into a giant bottomless pit they’ve named Clancy in order to appease the God of Food. Twenty percent of your number die from starvation every year but it is considered sacrilege to speak out against the practice.

What if you were that one out of 100? How would you feel? What if the prevailing mores and values were so utterly sacrosanct that merely attempting to buck the way the wind blows would get you shamed, beaten, thrown into a volcano, beheaded, burned at the stake or worse? Then how would you feel?

What if you were one in a thousand? Or one out of one hundred thousand? Or even, for the sake of argument, one in a billion?

What if, against all odds, you found yourself in that boat as one out of seven or eight billion? Then what?

This answers the question, “What is the nature of existence?”