The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Learning to Enjoy Life As it Passes

Listening to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was a complete 180 from last week's reading. Although both stories are absurd and sci-fi in nature, the tones and themes between the two are so vastly different that I almost got whiplash. Douglas Adams takes the listener/reader on a wacky and fantastic journey, but my biggest takeaway was: just take life as it comes to you and have fun with it. I mean, the question of the meaning of life is brought up and Adams just completely avoids answering it. At that point, I was more interested in the paradimensional mice and how the president of the galaxy could just lock himself out of his own mind for security reasons. The absurdity of it all made the story so fun to consume, and kept me wanting more when it left on a cliffhanger.

I think that in today's situation, Adams' treatment of story and meaning is a very useful one to adopt into our attitudes. Life has thrown us all through a loop, completely changing our lifestyles and what is most important. It really helps to just take things one day at a time and to do what you can because the future is so unpredictable right now. And no matter how weird (and oddly similar to satire) our situation gets, we will somehow make it through, moving on to the next crazy thing that life will throw in our way.

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