After feeding your family and preparing for your children's college education
the most important thing in life is getting people to feel sorry for you;
due to the effort required, this strikingly significant side of life
is largely ignored by most (to their ultimate regret).

No creature but man has been allowed this experience, and it is a true shame
that he does not more fully and widely avail himself thereof;
no other animal has been given the ability to seek sympathy from its peers,
and to let such an instinctive talent lie unused is to insult Nature.

Even though the desire for and capacity to solicit pity is innate in all men
it is one of those talents which will remain but latent if not nourished,
thus is it the duty of all right thinking adults to encourage its development in the young through their own example.

Everyone from Zoologists to Psychologists has attempted to pinpoint
one characteristic of man which defines his singularity, and if there be such,
there is no better candidate than his hunger for sympathy;
without this unique addition to his other basic drives man would have never produced The Pantheon; Guernica, The Mass in B minor,
the lending of money; the profession of medicine; religion; the autobiography;
lace up shoes, and the very concepts of good deeds, bad luck, reminiscing, and fame.
What poorer lives men would lead were they not blessed with this special gift of
wanting other humans to feel sorry for them individually.

And this brings up a key challenge that keeps many people from fully exploring
this most profitable instinctive hunger for sympathy:
the necessity of speaking about your personal life in the kind of intimate detail sufficient to show others that you are deserving of same;
an activity inherently distasteful to most people,
but which can be overcome via persistence and dedication.
What you need to do is focus on specific occurrences in your life;
and while death is available, since everyone is going to experience that,
you must personalize the pains and ills you suffer leading thereto,
and there are many bad things that can happen to a good person
that are not directly related to physical health,
and this is the area most fertile and open to exploitation;
this is not to deny illness as a potent tool for gaining sympathy,
but with the explosive advances in medical technology and diagnostic methods
you are faced with a never ending struggle to come up with ever newer,
and more exotic maladies than those claimed by others around you who are
also seeking pity on health grounds.
More readily available  --  and creatable possibilities for  getting others to
feel sorry for you rests in your relationships with other people and with life itself;
wherein you do not have to read obscure medical journals to find some
newly recognized ill that can befall your liver –
your tongue -- as quickly as it can move -- can spontaneously tell of some ill that has befallen you from treatment by some other human;
being lied to; cheated; disrespected; insufficiently appreciated, in fact the last one, expanded to its full glory, and prosecuted in its endless variations
is the only one really needed;
there are as many ways of a human being being, insufficiently-appreciated
as there are number of human beings,
for even though there are endlessly created examples you can present
whereby you were insufficiently-appreciated,
you are, at the heart of it, insufficiently-appreciated  --   in toto --  all over! --
everything about you, as the special, unique creature that you are,
is being unappreciated:
that is the Big Take on it;
the long view of why you deserve other intelligent people’s sympathy;
how can insightful humans not feel sorry for someone whose
special talents and understanding of life is not sufficiently recognized and appreciated.

The consistent, aggressive attempt to get others to feel sorry for you
can pay dividends long past the mere moment when you apparently have
succeeded in doing so (it is easy to fool yourself here --  which is another of its beauties),
and as relates to a person’s aim of getting to the bottom of things,
this activity has an affect thereon that is without equal.
 
 

For a favor received, a genii offered a man one of the following:
have the promising area of his brain receive the increased stimuli it sought, or
have his thinning hair increase in growth,
(the sprite’s experiences with humans having led it to expect a man to have an interest in either things of the body or of the mind),
but it was surprised that this man, as he pondered his choices,
began to slowly and erotically stroke his hair
as he smiled and gazed mysteriously off into some unknown, far away place.

And someone jumps up and objects:
“Yeah! --  but just you wait!  --
all of you hateful geniis and disruptive story tellers!  –  just you wait
‘til some day Captain Irony will fly in here and make everything right again.
Just you wait! “