Some things aren’t like the gravity or the law of thermo-dynamics; they don’t have to happen. They happen only if people are stupid enough to allow them to happen. Here, on this island, we haven’t allowed them to happen, so the “cosmic joke” hasn’t been played on us. We’ve had good sanitation for the best part of the century-and still we’r not overcrowded, we’re not miserable, we’re not under dictatorship.
And the reason is simple: “We chose to behave in a sensible and realistic way.”

Me as I think I am and me as I am in fact – sorrow, in other words, and the ending of sorrow. One third, more or less, of all the sorrow of that person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants of liberation, but subjects of the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through world wholly indifferent to our well-being, towards decrepitude and certainty of death. The remaining two thirds of all sorrow is home-made, and so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.

~Aldous Huxley~