Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short

“What defines us is that we don’t know what to do and there aren’t any revelations out there for us waiting to be found.  Profoundly disoriented and lacking any real mooring, we must make it all up from scratch ourselves, each one of us, individually.  We arrive in a bright room, wet, bloody, bewildered, some stranger smacking us and cutting what had been, up to that point, our only source of oxygen and food. We have no idea what is going on.  We don’t know what we’re supposed to do, where we’re supposed to go, who we are, where we are, or what in the world, after all this trauma, comes next.  We wail.” — Brian Christian, The Most Human Human (emphasis in original)