The Little Mermaid

I was thinking about the story of the Little Mermaid (the original tragic one) and about how one might decide to give everything up to become what one wishes to be, yet fail to achieve anything despite all that sacrifice. Most would feel that such a terrible outcome is unfair, but life itself is unfair. By Murphy's Law, bad things happen, and they happen all the time. It may be heart-breaking, but it is also reality. The question would probably be: Would one wish to take that chance, and gamble for happiness?

I've had a theory from some years past. Kinda rediscovered it when I was going through my old diary. Maybe life's like a role-playing game (RPG). It'd be such an irony if the players (namely, the participants in life) had selected their own attributes before birth, and had no recollection of that choice the moment they started playing (as in, they were born). So every player starts off with a certain equal number of attribute points. Points could be gained by assigning negative attributes, and points are spent on assigning positive attributes. Lazy players could even assign a whole slew of bad attributes so that the character would not be required to do much in life, and still get a high score at the end of the game (since unspent attribute points increased the score). Some players just preferred to have their points zeroed so they assign a mix of good and bad attributes.

Ok so I know that the concept is rather goofy, but I think it's delicious irony. Maybe everyone made the choice about what they'd wanted to be in life, but since the players had no recollection of the fact that they'd made the choices, they'd wound up dissatisfied with their lot in life, assuming that some awful force of nature was toying with them.

It's a bit of a play on the idea of one being on the seat of judgement against oneself after one dies. There was a suggestion that the person would be the one sitting on the seat when it came to judgement day. Food for thought. Still a little upset about the decisions one often makes in pursuit of happiness, and how it has a good chance of backfiring.