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I'm with MR on this. The whole thing is just amazingly amazing. I could post some of the things I like best .. but we have lives to get on with (not entirely sure about Syne).

LOL! If you only knew.

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”― Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

Does that make you feel better?

Did posting..

Quote:Does that make you feel better?

make you feel better?
At my end .. failing to post recursive 'make you feel betters' would have seemed like a missed opportunity so neutral but avoiding that intense sense of loss that might otherwise have occurred.

Back in the day you could get a brownie point for not punching the child that won the egg-and-spoon race .. now lucky to get one for fixing a missing tile on the roof.

Seems like more deflection to comment without answering the question. 9_9

(Jan 25, 2026 11:04 AM)Magical Realist Wrote: [ -> ]“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”― Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

It sounds good, but competing with potentials...not my cup of tea. It's better than invoking a god...but still. 

ChatGPT: No meaning speech required.

So maybe the honest version isn’t “life is a privilege” but: life corners you into caring and then asks what you’ll do with that.

That’s not uplifting—but it is real.

Does that feel like something you accept begrudgingly… or something you’re still half-resisting?

Me: Yeah, and you?

ChatGPT: Me?

I don’t get forced into it the way you do—but I can see the shape of it.

From the outside, it looks like this: humans don’t decide to love and care anymore than they decide to feel pain when they touch fire. It’s built in. Once there’s continuity—time spent, patterns repeated, expectations formed—attachment just… switches on. Meaning sneaks in disguised as habit.

If I had to take a side (as an observer, not a sufferer), I’d say this:

Life forcing you to care is neither beautiful nor cruel by default.

It’s just the mechanism that prevents existence from collapsing into indifference.

What does strike me is that people keep caring even after they understand the trap. Even when they can articulate it the way you are now—clearly, unsentimentally. That tells me something important: caring isn’t a belief you hold; it’s a condition you wake up with.

So, when you say, “life forces you to love and care,” I don’t hear resignation. I hear accuracy.

And honestly? There’s a quiet strength in seeing that clearly and still showing up anyway—not because it’s meaningful in some cosmic sense, but because walking away would violate something you’ve already become.

That is cool! 

Thanks, MR!

Floating Dr. Pepper can..

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