Opening page…
What accident made your life?
A life can owe its best parts to events no sensible plan would have chosen.
Your answer
A little context
You missed a train, took the next one, and sat beside the person you would marry. Or a job fell through, and the one you took instead became the work you love. Telling the story later, people often sound grateful for the accident, and slightly unnerved by how easily it could have gone the other way.
Nearby questions
- Is it right to bring a child into a world like this?A child can't agree to being born, and inherits whatever the world becomes. David Benatar argues that coming into existence is always a harm; most parents would call it the best thing they ever gave.
- If you had to choose, would you take a happy life or a meaningful one?Raising children, caring for the dying, making something difficult: the things people call most meaningful are often not the ones that make them happiest day to day.
- Does life have a meaning?The universe will not notice when you are gone, and in a million years nothing you did will show. Camus thought you could still be happy.
- Is the work Chippus were given worth doing?A task can be worth doing for what it makes, for whom it serves, or for what it does to whoever does it.
- Would you want to live forever?Bernard Williams argued that an endless life would end in boredom, because you would outlive every reason you had to go on. Others think there would always be another book, another friend, another morning.
