Modern life seems set up so that we can avoid loneliness at all costs, but maybe it's worthwhile to face it occasionally. The further we push aloneness away, the less are we able to cope with it, and the more terrifying it gets. Some philosophers believe that loneliness is the only true feeling there is. We live orphaned on a tiny rock in the immense vastness of space, with no hint of even the simplest form of life anywhere around us for billions upon billions of miles, alone beyond all imagining. We live locked in our own heads and can never entirely know the experience of another person. Even if we're surrounded by family and friends, we journey into death completely alone.
No one is born poor. People choose to become and remain poor. No one became wealthy from begging. Only people who have set limits on themselves do that. No one became wealthy from living off handouts. This is not the will of God for anyone. No one became wealthy from foraging in people’s bins. Only rats do that. You can excel and make money where you are without running helter skelter in search of green pastures.
Beaming into the thick of a tree without becoming a lifelong tree hugger was a tricky business. A precision job. Scrooby’s job at the Time Saving Agency was a tough one. Billions of lives depended on him not screwing up. Literally billions and billions. Once, he’d screwed up in only a very small way and people wore those little yellow smiley faces on t-shirts for decades afterwards – and that was just a small screw up. He sighed. Here he sat, in the branches of an apple tree in an apple tree orchard – and without a single apple in sight. Below him, Isaac was waiting to get bonked on the noggin with an apple so that he could fulfill history by toddling off to invent gravity and shape scientific and mathematical principles for generations to come. Only one problem – no apples.