Each one of us is born out of the earth, raised and nourished by it like a plant. Like a poppy, the child sprouts out of the ground and grows, its five tendrils on its few branches reaching out and grasping for things every single moment until it expires. We wrap around each other without consent, like the young ivy strangles the aging oak. In a fit of rage or fear, this plant lashes out and then is stupified when its actions are reciprocated.

In each of our journeys through life, none of us gets any closer to peace, for mental health is the only uncrackable frontier of science. Through research, development and ingenuity, we can each year extract more value into a single kilogram of earth, but it seems that no amount of science can remove any more misery from the human soul.

Despite the futility in this endeavor, each of us attemps to find serenity, struggling against each other in the proverbial rat race. To distract ourselves, we fall in love with movie stars and we have sex with our phones. We buy plastic plants, none of us catching the irony of this act. We sing our songs in harmony; here is my tale of Manchester United, of the Baltimore Ravens, and here, in this stadium, is my eternity. We take with us a pacifier everywhere we go. We drive it into our ears and we escape from wherever we are, a car ride, a train, our own homes with our life partners. Should the stream of delusion from our airpods be interrupted, we cry out in agony, unfamiliar with that intolerable silence of reality.

And each of us at the end returns to the earth, with force and unwilling submission. The sage, despite his years of practice, gasps his last breath with the same desperation as the discontented alcoholic. And none of us can find a satisfying reason as to why we continue on in this way.