Sometimes, you wonder how many problems we have are created for survival. Not against an outside threat, but a far more direct danger—the possibility of non-existence. Because problems mean you live, you feel, you influence; if you don’t have any, it might mean you cease to exist.

If you cut yourself in a forest and no one else is around, do you bleed?

People seem to find meaning in digging deep for problems, to give their soul a little bit to cry about now and then just so they can check they have one. Worse, some who can’t derive meaning from their own lives feel the need to expound on another’s, feeding off the vicarious experience of borrowed bleeding.

Like you, from the past, an accidental encounter every now and then. A visit to your online diarrhoea reveals a cry for help. But nothing in it tells me it’s not without agenda. And it seems to have spilled over into another’s space; someone else with far less imagination has taken your problems on hers, clumsily catching your blood as it drips, dancing in the blood bath you’re squeezing out of your arm.

Shame on all of us for needing to check every so often whether we’re alive. Shame on us for refusing to pull ourselves together, enjoying how being fragmented means we’re in more places at once. Shame on you for thinking you’re special.