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In college, Carol took a class on Eastern religions and learned the Buddhist idea that life is suffering. She didn’t realize that Buddhists had a hell until her Thai friend Pa told her about the cold Naraka, where among other horrors one might spend eight hundred trillion years shivering. Carol herself is agnostic, but when she wakes up and can’t find the energy to leave bed she often thinks about how humans spend so much of their existence in pain only to fantasize about its continuation once they die. Maybe suffering is how we know we’re human, Carol thinks, rolling onto her side and pulling the covers over her head, ignoring her own akrasia as she skips her meds for the fifth time in a week.