I’m sure that many of you would say that the worst thing that can happen is a house fire, right? Not only do you see everything you’ve worked hard to buy, build and preserve razed to the ground by brilliant apocalyptic flames, but you lose all of your photo albums. It’s like having your history erased. The day your house burns down is the first day of your life.
Others might say a death in the family, someone close to you dying before their time. There’s nothing worse than that. Parents outliving their kids. Grandparents out-living their nieces and nephews. To see youth wasted to the hands of Death, that is truly a tragedy. It doesn’t even compare to the meager inconveniences like the need for emergency plumbing in Melbourne.
Still others may say the worst thing is losing one’s own life. Or perhaps a nuclear war. Or maybe the death of your entire race, cultural group or nation. Maybe the thing you fear most is a trend of highly-educated godless and fluid liberals failing to procreate and thus causing the end of the human race. Sure this would be the most abominable thing imaginable, no?
In my case it’s none of the above. I have no close family who haven’t lived well and are not well into their elderly years. I also have all of my photos digitalised and stored on the cloud so I need not worry about my house burning down. Finally, I’m so solipsistic that I believe there is no life, no world, no humanity at the end of my life. Everything will simply be black nothingness.
Thus the worst thing that could happen to me is having the toilet clog up beyond the repair of a rubber plunger, and needing to call for plumbing. Melbourne drains are simply not built to withstand flushing anything big down the toilet. The blocked drain problem set me back a few bucks and also drenched my carpet, which was, needless to say, disgusting.