Long long time ago, human beings and animals only have a lifespan of 30 years. There’s the human, cow, dog and monkey.
The cow complained that 30 years’ lifespan was too long. Geez, his entire life was spent doing labor intensive work- and his owner kept beating him up. He was tired. So, he requested for his lifespan to be shortened to 15 years.
Now, who wants the balance of 15 years that the cow had gave up?
The human said, “please give it to me, please give it to me.”
And so, the lifespan of the human was increased from 30 to 45 years.
Next came the dog- now the dog also did not want such a long lifespan. “15 years for me is already enough. I do not want to spend so many years guarding the house. Gets a bit tiresome after a while.”
Somebody needs to take up the additional 15 years that the dog had given up, so the human happily volunteered.
And so, the lifespan of the human was increased from 45 to 60 years.
Finally, the monkey, hopping and jumping around also wanted to give up 15 years from the 30 years lifespan. Who’s the taker?
It’s the human of course, he couldn’t be more glad- he wanted to take whatever that was offered because he was greedy.
And so, the lifespan of the human was increased from 60 to 75 years.
He gleefully count the additional years that’s he was getting and thought what a good deal this was. And he thought, how silly of those other 3 animals were in giving up their lifespan years.
In the end, for the first 30 years, the human was alright.
He then spent the next 15 years working his butt off like a cow.
He retired at 45, and all he did the whole day was looking after the house and waiting for the kids to come back- like a dog.
Finally, he became mentally weak, and started to hop around and make demands, sometimes behaving in an unacceptable manner- sometimes, like an unreasonable child.
So, that was the typical human life.
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This story was verbally told to me by my 79 year old friend in Mandarin. I also remember reading about this story many years ago. Still, I wrote the above story in my own words. It could be ironically true for some people.
