Hear another parable. A pizza restaurant wanted to make more money, but pizza had been getting less popular in recent years for reasons we needn’t go into. At the same time there were many pizza restaurants and some of them were forced to close down because competition for diners was fierce and the restaurant actively stole customers from the other pizzerias. Sometimes people who didn’t even particularly care for pizza were ushered into the restaurant and sat there picking joylessly at their slices. But actually, as it turned out, pizza was still as popular as ever so the managers increased the number of chairs around each table. This is now the number of covers you have to meet. And the waiters said, This is a disaster. You’ve forced several good restaurants out of business to increase our customer base and now you’ve promised too many people slices of pizza and you haven’t hired any more chefs or built any more ovens and the restaurant is still the same size. We’re going to go out of our minds. No, it’s fine, The managers said. The managers had framed posters in their offices and the posters displayed two toucans sitting on a branch and the caption, in large embossed gold letters: AWESOME. It’s fine, we just make the slices of pizza a little smaller, just a little, not so as anyone would notice. Where once there were twelve slices of pizza, now there are sixteen. See? Did you just cut that pizza into twenty-four slices? What? Did we? Oh, whoops. I mean actually it looks fine though, doesn’t it? Give it a few weeks and nobody will even remember the old slices. By the way, you’re fired. But if you fire me who will make and serve and grudgingly slice into ever smaller slices the pizzas? We don’t really give a shit. How can you… We just don’t, we’d rather be asset strippers or arms dealers but somehow we ended up here dealing with you and your stupid pizzas and your idealistic notions about pizzas, which we see as a problem, which we see as not awesome. Here they gestured towards the framed print of the toucans which said AWESOME. Maybe you need to go away and decide if it’s time to join the adult world, maybe you could come up with a plan to slice a single pizza into over a hundred slices, that would show willing, that would show some potential, that would show that you weren’t just drifting around in the world thinking that you’re some kind of exception to human suffering and some awareness of the fact that the only decision left for you is whether you are to inflict or receive that suffering. I’ve given twenty years of my life to this restaurant. You haven’t given twenty years, you’ve given the same year twenty times. Now please fill in our exit survey before you pack up your things as we are always looking for ways to improve.