I couldn’t tell from the manual
I’m getting real tired of trying to get Life to work right, and I’ll bet you are too. So I complained to the Management.
Everybody assumes this Life thing is the best thing ever. It’s a powerhouse product; a gamechanger. It provides us with sunshine and rainbows, adventure and romance, and love and kisses, as long as you are willing to put up with a random amount of suffering and cruelty at variable intervals (which at least come with free shipping).
But it’s totally worth it, because with your subscription you have access to various levels of the whole birth/death/creation cycle. Read-only access, unless you go premium.
Life has branded itself with the “No Mud, No Lotus” slogan, cleverly deflecting attention from the fact that at least half the time the products or events it delivers will make you miserable. We humans have accepted that 50% failure rate from the start, and for a long time it looked as if we always would.
But some of us are beginning to wonder. Is Life really a quality product? Or does it do just enough to get by, confident that we have no other good options at the moment? Is Life really the best available option? Perhaps we should have gotten competitive bids.
At least one serious philosopher has started to ask whether we need Life at all. Professor David Benatar doesn’t think the benefits of Life (love, wonder, children, baby goats) actually outweigh the sheer suffering it deals out to nearly everyone (pain, loss, tragedy, dysfunction). (First worlders will add robocalls to that list.)
Professor Benatar has concluded, based on the plain facts, that the ROI on Life is clearly insufficient. He doesn’t recommend that anyone end an existing subscription, but he doesn’t recommend signing up any new customers, either.
It appears it’s time to issue an ultimatum: tell the Management we need to get a better product or know the reason why. So I did just that. I contacted the Management, and I demanded an explanation for the generations of misery Life had visited on its loyal customers.
“Listen, Life. We’ve just about had it with you.”
“Life, you’ve been abusing your monopoly all this time, and I, speaking on behalf of the whole human race, simply will not stand for it. We demand that you do a better job with this whole creation thing we’ve entrusted you with.
“Look — we supported your growth model from the start, right? We all just went around begetting like crazy, no questions asked. On your side the whole time.
“We put up with the design flaws, too — the built-in obsolescence; the no-return policy; the illnesses you called features when we knew they were, literally, bugs.
“We thought you were just new at the business and that your R & D would result in a more mature product as soon as you learned the market. (We thought there would be surveys and focus groups, by the way.)
“We even created active user groups, called religions, dedicated to making sense of your whole platform. Huge numbers of users put in countless hours of time supporting each other in troubleshooting, patching, sharing strategies, and just generally trying to get this thing to work.
“When our kids wailed, “We didn’t ask to be born!” we told them to be patient, that Life would get better; it was in beta testing; everybody was working on it.
“Later, our kids told their kids the same thing, and pretty soon everybody had to have therapy. Thanks for nothing.
“Meanwhile, even though some of the optics got better, the pain and the suffering and the wickedness just seemed to get worse! Every time one feature got better, another part broke!
“Take the begetting, for example. We’ve been happily begetting all this time, and now we can’t stop. So the planet is filling up, and the food is crazily distributed, and half the world is fat and the other half is starving. You’ve got 40,000 children dying from hunger and thirst every day! What the hell, Life? Didn’t you plan for that?
“And the life spans — look, you doubled the life spans for your first worlders, but only some of them, and your second and third worlders only got a little bit of additional time. And even for the luckiest first-worlders, you pulled a fast one. A lot of them didn’t get additional energetic, healthy years; they got an increase in high-maintenance years with declining opportunities to feel useful in the world. Again, poor planning, if you ask me.
“Now, we know that sometimes you are working with flawed material. You can’t always source the best flesh; we get it. Some people are going to be fragile and need extra care. We’re okay with that.
“But overall, the mix of Lives you are producing just seem to add up to an increasingly mean, miserable world. And you’ve been doing it from the start, even though we have complained about it over and over.
“And we keep asking you why that is, and you never answer, Life. Never! It is totally unacceptable.
“But look, we aren’t going to just take it anymore. Read Benatar’s article. We’re ready to just quit. Eventually, people will simply stop subscribing to Life entirely. Once they get off Facebook, they’ll realize what a crap deal you’ve been giving them for so long.
I’m telling you, Life, this is serious. It will take time, but it will happen.
“You just can’t hold people hostage forever, forcing them to buy a product that doesn’t work and makes them miserable.
“If nothing else, you owe us an explanation. So here it is, Life: the big question.
“Why, Life, after all this time, does your product still give us a world filled with wickedness, injustice, wars, poverty, and hate?”
That’s what I asked Life.
And Life answered: “User error.”
And I objected. But Life said, it’s all in the Terms and Conditions, which everybody agrees to, right? If you want to engage in Life, you’ve got to check that box.
Rev Dr Sparky on Real/igion 
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