Left to my own devices

For a lot of people, Monty Python and the Holy Grail is humorous piece of cinema, entertaining a multitude of audiences for over four decades, and helping to cement the comedy troupe's bonafides as masters of hilarity. Sure, it's all those things to me, but it is also more. There is a sobering element to it that has nothing to do with the film itself. I was a junior in high school and, up to that point, had only ever seen the Monty Python's Flying Circus TV show. A multimedia class taken earlier in high school had seen a fair amount of students using Ren & Stimpy and Monty Python audio files for projects (or just to mess around with), and so I'd heard snippets of dialogue from Holy Grail before seeing the film (if I never hear "We are the knights who say 'ni'" ever again, that will be okay).

An ad for a game popped-up recently on my feed, and the mood struck me as, 'sure, why not?' So I put the game on my phone and started playing. The game is BitLife, and its concept is that you basically live out someone's life, from birth to death. You can receive a random life, or choose from several. It tells you who your parents are, their age, whether or not you were a planned pregnancy, and if you have any siblings or family pets. Your location in the world is also known to you. It should be said that I am not trying to sell you on this game. I have no affiliation with it. Mostly, I was taken aback at how it impacted me. BitLife is a fun, and somewhat bittersweet experience. It allows you to live out a life you never had, and make different choices than perhaps you made during your own existence. The game also provided me with a glimpse into how I might respond to things during old age, and that was perhaps the most emotional aspect of all.