A Tale of Two Cats
There is a glass door in my house that tells you everything you need to know about the world.
On one side: Sassy. Scottish Fold, indoor cat, queen of everything she surveys. She has spotted Pirate through the glass and is doing that thing cats do — back arched, nose wrinkled, a slow hiss that says you do not belong here. On the other side: Pirate. One eye, scarred leg, perpetual hunger. She is not hissing back. She is just looking at Sassy — quietly, almost hopefully — as if some small gesture of approval from this pampered stranger might mean something.
It never comes. Sassy turns and walks away. Pirate waits a moment longer, then goes back to surviving.
I’ve thought about that glass door a lot.
Sassy eats well, sleeps well, and moves through the house like she owns it — because as far as she’s concerned, she does. She has her spot on the sofa, her favourite corner, her routines that we’ve unconsciously built our days around. If something displeases her, she makes just enough of a scene to let you know she noticed, and that you should feel bad about it.
She has given us, as a family, some of our most joyful and ridiculous moments — the kind you don’t plan and can’t manufacture. My kids have accused me of overfeeding her, treating her like royalty. “She’s just a cat,” I’d tell them. She’s not going for an MBA. She’s not running a company or becoming a doctor. Let her be.
Then there’s Pirate. She was a street cat — we started feeding her one day and she simply never left, stationing herself outside the door like it was always her post. We named her Pirate because when she was young, she lost an eye in a fight. She didn’t stop there. She’s nearly died three times since. Once she got tangled in a metal security fence and nearly lost her leg. She survived that too.
She’s a hustler — follows you around doing this performance, meowing and crouching and blinking slowly, that she clearly thinks is charming but honestly isn’t convincing anyone. She’s not elegant. She doesn’t own any room she walks into.
But Pirate is alive in a way that Sassy simply isn’t.
I think the way the world is going, most of us are living as Sassy.
Not by choice, exactly. More by design. We’ve built a world extraordinarily good at removing friction and absorbing pain.
Headache? Tablet. Anxiety? Prescription. Boredom? Scroll. We’ve optimised so relentlessly for comfort that we’ve sedated ourselves — not into happiness, just into a kind of flatness. A life that is safe, managed, and increasingly hollow.
That’s Sassy’s life exactly. Everything provided. Nothing required. No meal to be earned, no fight to be made, no morning where survival is genuinely in question. She will never know what it feels like to want something so badly that you’d embarrass yourself, or even get killed for trying to get it.
I know this feeling from the inside. I write — not because I have to, it doesn’t pay my bills — on my own terms, as and when I want. And lately that freedom has become its own quiet trap. A few hours a week. Enough to feel like I’m doing it.
Not enough to actually go anywhere. I know I should be showing up more, engaging, and building a readership. I know this. And yet there’s no real hunger behind the knowing. No Pirate-like desperation pushing me toward the glass. I’m comfortable.
And comfort, it turns out, is a very effective anaesthetic. You don’t feel it working. That’s the whole point.
I wrote about this in a different context recently — about how most of us aren’t depressed, we’re just under-alive. We confuse pleasure with vitality, productivity with purpose, and comfort with contentment. None of them are the same thing.
Aliveness is something else entirely. It arrives in flashes: after effort, in honest connection, in the quiet pride of becoming slightly more than we were yesterday. It’s not something you can optimise into. You can’t schedule it. You have to earn it — or at least, you have to show up in a way that makes it possible.
What strikes me about Pirate isn’t the suffering — it’s the engagement. She is fully in it. Every meal she begs for matters. Every fence, every fight, every morning she makes it through — it counts. She’s not waiting for conditions to improve or for life to feel a little safer before she starts living it. She’s living it now, with one eye, a dodgy leg, and absolutely zero dignity.
There’s a version of the good life we’ve been sold that looks a lot like Sassy’s. Security. Routine. Comfort. Everything taken care of. And I understand the appeal — I’ve chased it too. But somewhere along the way, I started noticing that the more I optimised for safety, the less I felt. Not less pain. Less everything. Less hunger. Less urgency. Less of that electric sense of being here.
Zorba, Kazantzakis’s great, unwashed, impossible character, said it plainly: “Life is trouble. Only death is not.” He wasn’t celebrating suffering. He was saying a life scrubbed clean of all trouble isn’t really a life. It’s a waiting room.
We’ve built very beautiful waiting rooms.
I watch Sassy sometimes, stretched out in the afternoon sun, perfectly still, perfectly comfortable, and I think: she doesn’t know any different. That’s the thing about being sedated. You don’t feel the sedation. Everything feels fine because you’ve lost the ability to sense what fine actually costs you.
Pirate doesn’t have that problem. She knows exactly what she wants. She knows exactly what it costs. And she goes after it anyway — badly, desperately, without grace — every single day. She could die tomorrow. She nearly has, several times. But she is not waiting for the right moment, or the right conditions, or for life to become a little kinder before she engages with it.
She’s in it. Now. Fully.
Most of us feel it — that low hum, in the quiet moments. The sense that something is missing, but the comfort is too comfortable to go looking for what it is. We’ve confused the absence of suffering with the presence of aliveness. They are not the same thing.
Maybe the question worth asking isn’t how to make life safer.
Maybe it’s how to make it more like Pirate’s.
One eye. Still fighting. Still here.