A friend of mine once used this analogy: Life is a scenic and more or less easy - not to say comfortable - ride on a conveyor belt. As long as one avoids the edges and the spaces between the plates, one progresses more or less as one should to the end of the line. One is neither unduly taxed nor rewarded in the process.

Some people are, by choice or circumstance, not afforded this convenience. They've fallen off and are forced to come to terms with the fact that there's no getting back on. People passing are the subject (or the source) of constant misunderstanding and subsequent grief, because the issues of mobility and navigation cannot be mapped onto mutually exclusive experiences.

It's tempting to write it off as a simplistic 'cast-away' fable, but as long as one doesn't start to burden the analogy with sentimentality, a sense of Platonic or Romantic Rightness, or overly Calvinistic fatalism, it actually helps frame the context.

So one way to look at it is that you are, perforce, master of your own fate, beholden to few, forgotten by most, accompanied only by your cat and the very rare others to whom this whole conveyor belt thing is stupid and gets in the way of dinner and grooming.