Do we really need you here?

Have you ever asked yourself the question: do they really need me here? How many lives would be different if my parents hadn't met, if my mother got an abortion or if I was a dead-born baby?

Don't start telling me you're so fucking special, cos you're not. Wayne Rooney is. He can run for 90 minutes every three days, score goals out of nowhere, and make 90.000 people happy or desperate for the following week. You can't do that, can you?

Let's try to make a list of what you represent to most people and institutions:

1. For the State: either a tax-payer or a tax-eater, depending on your situation and the country you live in. In both cases you represent an excel cell with a minus or a plus in front of your name. So you're a number.

2. For your country: either an ambassador (Frodo Baggins from the Shire for instance) or a simple name-bearer. Let's say you're English and your name is Philips: your existence merely consists in passing the name from the the previous Philips (your father) to the next Philips (your son). So you're a bridge.

3. For your family: a funny-looking chap or girl whose face resembles a random puzzle of the family genetical mix. In other terms you're a mirror. With funny attibutes, all right, but a mirror still.

4. For your sexual partner: a performer and a witness. You perform love at various levels and provides your better half with a full time audience. It is statistically proved that most of what remains after a fellow's death (apart from the everlasting souvenir of his or her unquestionable uniqueness) is photographs and movie shots taken while on family trips.

5. For your friends: a leitmotiv; an electric cable winding across the jungle of life which keeps them in touch with their own past, and which they can grip at will during their sea diving.

6. For yourself: a toy you can move, alterate and use for interaction with the other toys. You are your own little robot waiting for a command.

7. for humanity: read Schopenhauer's Über die Freiheit des menschlichen Willens and go back to sleep.

So, to sum up: you're a number, a toy, an electric cable, a mirror, a bridge and a witness. Would you take any of these items with you on a deserted island to spend the rest of your life? Of course not. You will leave them behind. The good news then is, you don't have to go.