“Life is one fool thing after another; love is two fool things after each other.” – Ambrose Bierce
To be honest, it’s part of the human condition to have problems. Contrary to popular opinion we’re not the “animal that thinks,” not the toolmaking animal, not even “featherless bipeds.” We’re the animal that complains.
Nothing wrong with that, by the way. If we didn’t have complaints, and “one damn thing after another,” we’d still be drinking out of mud puddles and dying in our 20s!
To thoroughly bastardize dead, white Karl Marx, we’re always going to have problems for the same reason a silkworm will always spin silk. And to paraphrase Paul Graham in Hackers & Painters, if we don’t pick big, interesting ones we’ll end up with tiny, tiresome ones like the ones that absorb all the attention of high schoolers, prison inmates, and the staff and management on The Office.
