The Allegory of the Arrival

The Waiting Room

You are standing in a very big room. This room has been there since before time, before your existence. Everyone is standing in lines here. We are all waiting for the exact same thing: to be born into the world.

The First Gate: Choosing a Country

In this place, you pick your country yourself. Nobody assigns it to you. You have total freedom to choose. When you arrive at the gate for the country you picked, you see that it splits into two lines. One line is very short. It is a priority line. But there is a catch, they check your score. If your score clears the bar, you can use it.

The other line is the general line. It is open to anyone. No score is required. You just have to wait, no matter how long the line is. If you clear the bar, the short line is yours. You could still choose the general line, if you really wanted to. But if you do not clear the bar, you have no choice. The general line is the only line you will ever see.

For many countries, they barely need this split. Their general line is short enough anyway. So, the short line hardly matters. But a few gates draw a huge crowd every single time. One of them, which is longer than all the others combined, leads to the United States.

The Weight of the Line

Its general line does not just have more people in it. It moves much slower too. The desk at the end of it is the busiest one in the whole building. If you clear the score for that gate, none of that waiting applies to you. You go to the same country. You meet the same desk. But it is a completely different wait.

The Second Gate: The Parent Pool

It turns out, choosing your country is just the first gate. It is not the only one. There is a second gate inside the country: you have to choose your parents.

The parents come sorted into pools. They are graded very simply, just like you would guess: AAA, AA and A. And nothing stops you from walking straight up to the line for the 'AAA' pool. The split happens exactly the way it did at the country gate. Every single parent pool has its own short line and its own general line. If you clear the score, the short line is yours. If you don't, the general line is all there is. Everybody wants the grade AAA parents. Because of this, its general line is the longest thing in the whole terminal.

Three Paths to Arrival

In the end, everyone who makes it to their dream country carries one of three stories. In the first story, they stood in the general line the whole way. They waited, step by step, alongside everyone else in the crowd until they reached the desk. In the second story, they had the score. They walked right past the tired crowd and used the short line to get to the exact same desk without feeling the wait.

In the third story, the line for their dream country was so impossible that they stepped out of it. They walked to a completely different gate just so they could finally be born. They started their life somewhere else and had to spend the rest of it fighting to cross over to the place they wanted in the first place.

We all end up in the same world but we do not all pay the same price to get there.