One of the hardest lessons to learn growing up is that there aren't really any adults, not in the sense I believed when I was a kid. "Adult" is a role people play when they're interacting with kids. Some do it better than others. But inside every adult is a terrified child† desperately struggling to make sense of an uncertain, incomprehensible world. Unfortunately for that child, life always ends in death; it won't be long until you are dead and everyone who remembers you is dead. And our reasoning abilities are not capable of understanding very much of the world, so often nothing we do matters, not even for the purposes it was intended for. Mostly our understanding of the world consists of stories we tell ourselves with relatively little connection to reality.

Our understanding of the world is profoundly mediated by fiction, which is to say, lies.

That's why it all ends up like children arguing on the playground. The kind of playground‡ where my 14-year-old classmate Evangalyn Martinez got stabbed to death for, I think it was, stealing Joella Mares's boyfriend, and nobody leaves the playground alive.

Under those circumstances, what does it mean to live a good life rather than a bad one? Good answers exist, but they're not easy.

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† This is a metaphor. I don't mean that each adult has literally swallowed a child and is digesting them alive like a python.

‡ Technically that was actually the parking lot. Also, I was already no longer her classmate at the time, and because we were in different grades, I don't remember if I ever met her. She wouldn't be my last classmate to be stabbed; in my high school biology class each student was paired with the same lab partner for the whole semester, and the next year, someone else at the high school nonfatally stabbed my lab partner, Shannon Sugg, now Shannon L. Schneider (ginga.snapz1718). If memory serves, she dropped out from the psychological trauma. You can read the decision in her lawsuit against the school at https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/nm-court-of-appeals/141549..., which says it was Alicia Andres who stabbed her. ”Plaintiff asserts that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment imposed a clearly established duty upon school officials to protect her from this stabbing.” I'm glad violent crime has dropped a lot since then in the US.