As it seems, life goes on a steep downwards slope.

Everything gets worse and worse and snowballs into a wreck.

yes it's a wreck.

At the end of the line, death awaits us.

You can escape, you can run, but you cannot hide.

Everyday, we think "oh, how i wish life gets better."

But no, life doesn't listen to your wishes. or probably don't give a damn about your wish anyway.

here's a case study of a typical life.

At birth, we feel the most bliss. As an innocent life form born out of your mother's womb, you feel the care, the warmth, the love that all typical babies get. You feel the love. And that's because you don't know what Life is. You may know the game of Life, but no, that's not life.

For the first 7 years of life, colloquially known as stage 1, you spend your days playing, going to preschool, knowing nothing at all about the world, and generally getting the aww's from everyone who know you. Your parents forgive you for mistakes you make. Your grandparents are still alive. You are the luckiest person in the world, or so you thought.

Your first step into life is when you take that first small step into your elementary school. You realise that, for the first time in your life, your mum scolds you and refuses to forgive you if you fail a test. You are punished. You are forbidden to watch TV. You can't touch your toys. You are indoctrinated that you will study and become a "man of the society" in the future. You are taught that doctors, lawyers and engineers will become rich and you should aim to become them. You get your first taste of capitalism here: only the rich will survive. You study and cry, and study more. You may emerge a victor or a normal person. You make friends that you think will last forever. You meet bullies who you are so afraid of you would ask your mother to protect you from.

But anyway, you still think that hey, life is still good! my parents are there to protect me. I can't wait to go to junior high school! Life may be slightly unsettling, but i am sure the bullies will disappear right? I have my best friends from primary school anyway!

Well, you are wrong.

As you step into Stage 3 of the Big Cosmic Game of Life, you realise that shit just gets worse. The old kiddy bullies are gone. Now comes the real bullies. If you get targeted, expect to be the bullseye, the one that everyone laughs at, jokes at, and show utter disrespect at. You realise that tests aren't that easy as compared to primary school anymore. You realise that your parents don't protect you that much anymore. You are grown up now. You don't want to rely on your parents. You don't want to be seen as the mummy boy. You realise a growing gap between you and your parents. You may have already witnessed a loss of a dear one. Your primary school friends found their own cliques in their new schools. You feel alone. You feel lost. You begin to lose hope in the world. But still, you believe that life will probably get better. Teenage angst typically arises here. Slitting of wrists or having a unbelievably long fringe happens at this phase too.

You've reached phase 4! Congratulations on coming thus far. More shit is in store for you. You realise that Junior High was mere child's play once you step into the high school. Bullying doesn't disappear. Instead it finds a new medium. No more beatings. No more harsh language. It goes to a whole new level They stalk you on the net, cursing you, laughing at you, or mobillize groups of friends to spread the word. You are pretty much alone in the world. People you knew fell sway to their words, and ignores you. You ask "why is life so screwed up?" You get lesson number 2 here: This is society, where betrayals and distrust plagues the human heart. Why trust? You will get backstabbed, frontstabbed, and then tossed into a river somewhere near the school. okay, maybe not the river part.

School becomes harder and harder, yet to be that "man of the society" you so endeavored for in your childhood, you fight. You study and study, for subjects you probably won't even look at a few years down the road, just for that job you always wanted.. until you realized, studying now won't help. Those jobs were decided from birth. You either had it, or not, or you could study really really really really impossibly hard to get that job anyway. You realise that society had a hierachy, and most unfortunately, you aren't on top. You are probably the normal guy who will end up being the secretary or the clerk of that rich, influential guy sitting next to you in class being the smart rich and gifted person he is. Face life lesson number 3: You don't decide where you stand in the world. The world decides where you stand, from that you in that tiny egg.

yes. i mean it.

You can say you are fighting destiny, but more likely, Destiny is having his dinner now and laughing at you through a camera in the sky about how futile your actions are.

Then there's always the love life, if it even exists. You find that girl you like, and attempt to ask her out. Of course, being nice, open and always available can be disturbing to a girl. She repeatedly give you lame excuses my 3 year old niece could come up with, like "busy now, how about next time?", while actually all she means is "go away. i am so not going out with you." But of course, being the hopeful guy you still are despite all the crap you faced in this world, you believe it. You believe in the "next time". Even if you don't believe in it, you desperately hope for it to be real. You hope. and hope. until you hear rumours spread that the girl actually had that asshole next class for a boyfriend all along, yes all along while you were asking her out. You know, that guy who was part of the bullies, or that gang of people who snubbed the rest? yea, him. And she doesn't even tell you. You, the nice guy, got defeated by an asshole. Yea, how's that for asshole. Here, we reach life lesson #4: Nice guys get laid aside. Assholes get laid. and incidentally, lesson #5: True nice guys always lose. Be an asshole sometimes.

Now you lose hope in life. People you believed before are no longer worthy of trust. You realise that all your "friends" are really just acquaintances that really don't give a damn about you once your utility is up. You are faced with a void for sociability and an F for grades. (also an F for life.) So what would you do now? You do what humans do best: when they Fail, they Always Talk about HOPE, otherwise known as FAT HOPE. yes. you hope for a better tomorrow, even though apparently throughout 17 years, your hope seemed to have gotten your life worser.

You graduate from High School and reach tertiary level and beyond. Congratulations. You are officially in this shithole called Life. You have reached Level Capitalism. You realise that all that money you've been spending all this time were hard earned cash, and that you got to start working to earn them. No more feeding of money. You realise that that car you always wanted, that Lamborghini or Porsche, from young, costs about 400 thousand, or colloquially known as "more money than you will ever earn in life." you reach the dark spot in life. You are lost. Your relatives start to die off. Your parents, the only ones you could have ever trusted with all your heart despite all the quarrels you had, begin to leave you. You regret all the shit you have done to them, all the late night quarrels over mundane things. You wished you treated them better. You see those who have succeeded reach the highest pinnacle in life, as you watched from the valley of despair. You, who always thought yourself as the main character in life, have always merely been a supporting character, "student A" per se, who will never become something.

Life just gets worse and worse. You reach the peak of despair, while that asshole in front of you in class reaches the peak of success. He is rich, you are poor. He has the hot loving wife, you know, that girl who in a most unneccessarily roundabout manner rejected you using "busy" as an excuse. Yea. While you lay in the slums. Drunk. Alone. Jobless. With no future. A failure indeed.

In your drunken stupor, a beam of light catches your eye and you realize, albeit too late, that your whole life have been an example of life lesson #6. Life DOES NOT get better.

Life is only a passage unto death. A lullaby of sorrow that reaches a crescendo of pain, as you lose everything, your love, your friends, your family, all to the endless void. Then you lose your mind to that capitalist society. You become a follower of the religion called Money. You work hard to earn the grace of money. You believe that you control money, but ultimately fail to realize that it has been money who had always been controlling you.

You fall into a spiral of madness, disorientation and delusions as you reach your ultimate end. Maybe you were lucky enough to not reach the final phase of life before dying. You could die with some hope in you. But if you reincarnated, you would not have learnt your lesson. For most people, we would have experienced the full force of life, and in the midst of it realise all the life lessons that we learn.

We are ultimately pawns of our own mind. We play the game of life thinking that we are in control, that we control the king and queen of life, but in reality, you are really just that pawn who will be first to die in a battle.