A Philosophical Inquiry That Basically Boils Down to Self-Pity

Modern life is missing something.

Those of a Judeo-Christian religious bent will no doubt recall the story of Job, who's living a pretty posh life until God and the Devil place a bet, and poor Job winds up in a pretty miserable state. Job's friends, of course, start asking Job what sin he committed to warrant the treatment he's receiving. 

And then there's the ancient Greeks and Romans. If any of the various mythology-based movies of the last few decades remotely resembles the reality of the day,* then here's another case where bad times basically boiled down to a question of which god the sufferer pissed off, and what sacrifice was necessary to make appeasement. 

Or we can talk karma. Here again we've got a philosophy that argues that crappy things happening are just the universe responding to whatever crappy thing the sufferer did. What goes around comes around and all that.**

And while I'd argue that there's a certain measure of malevolence in suggesting that someone suffering bad times did something to deserve it, I'd also argue that there had to be some comfort in being able to look to the sky, shout "What the hell did I do?," and reasonably expect that there's actually an answer. 

'Cause frankly, I want to know what I did, or who I pissed off, to warrant the year I've had. Increasingly, I'm finding that "random chance" is just a woefully lacking explanation. 


* Yeah, yeah. It's a questionable assumption, particularly when one takes the recent Pompeii into account. 

** It is, of course, interesting that folks seem far more willing to accept that good things happening to them are a function of their good actions than that bad things happening are a function of their bad actions.