It’s more than safe for me to say it: life is bullshit. Full stop. And it’s not negative to admit that. It’s not pessimistic. It’s not self-defeating. It’s just calling the mess what it is. Even King Solomon — supposedly the wisest human to ever walk the dirt — looked around at the circus of existence and said, “All is vanity under the sun.” Translation in Bullshit Factor terms: Congratulations, folks, everything down here is one big cosmic pile of nonsense.

​

And then you’ve got Viktor Frankl, a man who stared into the black hole of human suffering — real hell, not the watered-down, social-media-complaint kind — and still managed to squeeze purpose out of it. When he said, “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves,” he wasn’t offering a motivational poster. He was telling the truth from inside the darkest corners of humanity. That’s not a fortune cookie. That’s a man who learned to grow roots in concrete.

​

And Maya Angelou? She didn’t just live through storms; she became the storm. When she said, “You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them,” she wasn’t pretending the world is soft and forgiving. She knew the world will knock the wind out of you, steal your breath, and kick you while you’re trying to stand up. And still — she refused to bow. Refused to break. Refused to let the bullshit bury her.

​

These people weren’t strangers to hardship. They knew the harsh realities of life because life served them a buffet of garbage. They didn’t get a gentle sprinkle of trouble; they got dumped on. They got drenched in it. And just like the rest of us, they also created some of their own mess — because every human does. Nobody is innocent of contributing to their own chaos. That’s part of the deal of being alive.

​

But here’s the difference: They didn’t drown in their bullshit. They composted it. They turned it into fertilizer. They used it to grow something bigger, braver, stronger, and more meaningful than the mess that tried to break them and that’s the Bullshit Factor truth: Life is not beautiful because it’s clean. Life is beautiful because you can build meaning out of the very things that tried to ruin you. The bullshit is unavoidable — but the fertilizer is optional.