Polyhedron

I’m going to offer you a choice. It’s a choice you make right now, but it’s effects will reach far into the future – perhaps reaching as far as you yourself will go. You could think of it a coin toss, only the coin has, let’s say, twenty sides. I know, right? Well, you toss this coin, and if it lands a certain way up, a child dies. Yes, that’s right, a child dies. Cruel. I know, it’s a very cruel coin.

If the many-sided coin (I know I said twenty, but it’s a metaphorical coin, and it’s tough to pin down) lands a different way, you die. You, yourself, hard to imagine I know, die. Like, dead-forever, no-messing die. Harsh times. At the risk of being vague, there are a few other pretty horrendous potential outcomes – for example, an innocent person becomes permanently disabled, your yourself become permanently disabled, there’s some PTSD, a little facial disfigurement, all manner of horrible stuff. You get it though, if this coin goes against you, then the consequences are gonna be pretty severe. You’ll regret it, put it that way. Or I suppose, then again, maybe you won’t, if you get snuffed out of existence in an instant you probably won’t ever get the chance to regret it. Depending, of course, on what you believe – I happen to know you won’t, like, but then I’m not gonna bother trying to convert anyone today.

There are lots of other, much more minor sides the coin could fall on – you could lose your livelihood. Minor, compared to permanent disability, you might say, but then we don’t ever hold up real occurrences next to imagined ones for comparison, do we? Not when they’re turfing you out of your house, like. By the way, when I say ‘we’ I obviously mean you – not like any of this ever happens to me, is it?

Ok, so I’m aware that the number of sides has grown considerably since we started talking, but hey that’s just the entangling nature of these things, and I myself can often be an unreliable and fickle thing. Take it as you will. Anyhow, there are a ton of sides, some with mere trifling little bothers attached to them, like ‘feeling a little annoyed’ or ‘having to skip breakfast.’ Nothing really that you’d call ‘good’, though – nothing appealing whatsoever, in fact it’s all just kinda bad really. Varying degrees of bad, from the horrendous and life-changing to the inconvenient and slightly bothersome. A vast spectrum of unpleasantness. I think you get the picture?

Now, the choice – do you want to toss the many-sided coin of unpredictable and unpleasant outcomes?

Or would you rather just get out of bed on time?