Whether we are sovereign or enslaved in our being, what of it? Our species will still look to the future and see no need to abdicate its puppet dance of replication in a puppet universe where the strings pull themselves. What a laugh that we would do anything else, or could do anything else. That our lives might be a paradox and a horror would not really be a secret too terrible to know for minds that know only what they want to know. The hell of human consciousness is only a philosopher's bedtime story we can hear each night and forget each morning when we awake to go to school or to work or wherever we may go day after day after day. What do we care about the horror of being insufferably aware we are alive and will die ... the horror of shadows without selves enshrouding the earth ... ort he horror of puppet-heads bobbing in the wind and disappearing into a dark sky like lost balloons?

[...] Almost nobody declares that an ancestral curse contaminates us in utero and pollutes our very existence. Doctors do not weep in the delivery room, or not often. They do not lower their heads and say, 'The stopwatch has started'. The infant may cry, if things went right. But time will dry its eyes; time will take care of it. Time will take care of everyone until there are none of to take care of.

from Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race