Where's your money at?

Congratulations! You are a contestant on the epic Canadian game show "The Amazing Hike."  Over the course of two weeks you and a randomly selected teammate must hike across a rugged and heavily forested region of northern Ontario.  Each team will be given basic supplies and then air dropped at a random location approximately two-hundred kilometers from the final destination point.  If you make it to this point before all of the other teams you will win a huge cash prize! There's only one catch...

It's a compound kind of life

Have you ever met someone who seems to be wildly successful in every way?  They're crazy happy, healthy, hilarious, generous, have a great career, a wonderful spouse, and an incredible array of close friends.  Their journey through life appears smooth and effortless, skipping over difficult obstacles like they were nothing and laughing all the way!

Conversely, have you ever met someone whose life is a total disaster?  Every problem is twisted into a complicated and seemingly inextricable knot with all of their other problems.  Even if they could summon up the requisite courage to stage an assault on their tribulations you wouldn't have a clue where they should begin.

In both of these cases the question invariably arises,  "How does someone get like that?"

Within the first context, we might answer this question with a sigh of longing and perhaps a "I don't know, but that will never happen to me..."  In the second, we might answer with a sigh of relief and another chorus of "I don't know, but that will never happen to me!"  Becoming like these individuals seems extremely unlikely because their reality seems so far away from our own.  However, I think that we are far closer to becoming like either of these people than we might think!  Here's why...