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You Never Know When It’s “Game Over”
Our lives are dangerously precarious.
A few days ago, I overheard a story where a woman relayed how her coworker had lost her 27-year-old daughter. It was a tragic thing: the girl walked past a stopped train, only to be hit by another train she didn’t realize was arriving. I can’t imagine how the girl’s mother felt when she received that call.
Overlaid with that tragic anecdote has been the ongoing war in Ukraine. Just today there was the news that people waiting in a bread line had been killed by Russian shelling. Imagine that: you’re just waiting for food, for sustenance that you need to survive while your country’s torn to shreds, and then you die on the pavement moments before you might have been on your way home, bread in hand.
I almost tell myself we have to be living in a big simulation, a mixture of The Sims and The Matrix, where dying is just like blinking out of a well-made video game concocted by some greater power — God? Aliens? — that exists. I want to rationalize the pain and the unnecessary quality of so many people’s suffering, but there are no answers provided by the realms of religion or philosophy that satisfy me.
Thinking this way — like life is all one big game — makes me also theorize that there are “winners” and “losers” in the “levels” we face dependent on…
