How can that be in your solid state?

"Do you ever think when you look at someone, when you listen to someone, does that person really have a life?" Abdul asked his friend, who had been practicing his English by studying an advertisement for mango-flavored candies. Sunil liked to listen to Abdul, despite the invisible magnets. "Like that woman who just went to hang herself, or her husband, who probably beat her before she did this?" Abdul said. "I wonder what kind of life is that - I go through tensions just to see the kind of life they're living. But it is a life. Even the person who lives like a dog still has a kind of life. Once my mother was beating me for something, and that idea just came to me. I said, 'If what is happening now - you beating me - is to keep happening for the rest of my life, it would be a bad life, but it would be a life, too.' And my mother was so shocked when I said that. She said, 'Don't confuse yourself by thinking about such terrible lives.'"

--Katherine Roo, "Opening Night" (essay in the New Yorker about Gautam Nagar, an airport slum in Mumbai)