Imagine we’re all on a ship.

It’s an old interstellar cruiser with a thousand blinking panels, a thousand petty arguments, and a thousand little routines that keep the air flowing. Somewhere deep in the hull, a warning light has been on for as long as anyone can remember… impact is inevitable.

No date, no coordinates, no countdown we can trust. Just the certainty that the ship doesn’t last forever.

And most days, the crew behaves like the warning light is decorative. People argue about seating charts in the mess hall. They collect badges. They trade rumors about who’s “winning” ship-life. They rehearse the same stories until the stories start to feel like oxygen.

But every so often, someone stops, notices the light, and feels the floor tilt.

Because if the ship crashes, then the question changes. It’s no longer “How do I look while I’m here?”. Instead it becomes “What do I build with the time the ship gives me?”

Some of us get dealt constraints. A broken console, a tough shift rotation, a supervisor who confuses dominance for leadership. A body that needs sleep. A mind that can’t run at full voltage every day. You don’t always get to choose the stressors, and you don’t always get to choose the conflicts.

But you can choose what you do inside them.

There are people who spend their whole lives polishing the brass rails of the observation deck, convinced that if the rails shine hard enough, the ship will never meet the rock. There are people who drink to forget the light exists. There are people who try to become important by making everyone else smaller. And there are people who quietly start rewriting the ship’s manual so the next generation won’t have to guess which switches matter.

Then there are the ones who look for the exit pods.

Not because they are cowards… because they are honest. They ask: is there a way off this ship? Is there a way to leave behind something that survives the crash? Maybe not physically. Maybe it’s a set of notes. A theorem. A platform. A company. A story that makes someone braver. A kindness that prevents a spiral. A love that turns survival into meaning.

When you remember the warning light is real, you stop bargaining with smallness. You stop asking permission to take your life seriously.

And you start doing the only sane thing:

You learn the ship.

You help the crew.

You build the pod.