For thousands of years man has pondered the secret of life. Today, one man tells the world.

The secret of life is not that difficult to figure out. In fact, I was sitting here wondering what to do and it suddenly came to me. I wasn't even thinking about it! That tells me that it's either really easy or I'm a genius. Either way I'm smarter than you so listen up and learn from me.

The secret of life is: don't die. Seriously, that's it. If you succeed in not dying you have already achieved the secret of life and you can stop looking.

Dying is typically the end of living. Death and Life are not true opposites because you can have undeath (vampires, zombies, New Zealand's whaling activists) but unlife is simply death. Despite this they are pretty close to opposites of one another. To succeed in one means to fail in another. Death means you failed at life, and life means you have (so far) failed at death. Simple, isn't it?

So let's look at death for a moment then. They say everyone dies, right? Well, I haven't died. My mother hasn't died, the dog I abandoned six years ago still manages to hobble back to my house on its one good leg every two or three years so I assume it's still alive. If everyone dies then why aren't we all dead?

I enjoy lists so I'm going to start with a list of people who have failed to discover the secret of life (which, in essence, means they failed at life):

• God (has not been verified, but Friedrich Nietzsche has never been wrong before)
• Aborted babies
• Thousands of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan
• Nearly 3,000 people in the World Trade Centre plane crashing party
• Those kids in South Korea who died from playing too much Diablo
• People with AIDS

If you are one of these people then you aren't reading this because you already failed. This is for the rest of you, the winners. You can be happy knowing that you're better than everyone in the list I just gave you.

To help the winners stay winners I've come up with another list to ensure you continue being winners. These are the things you should and should not do to ensure you never die:

• Never sign your name on anything. Sign your wife's name, your mother's name, your dog's name, but never your own name
• Never get any of the following diseases: cancer, AIDS, SARS, swine flu, bird flu, the disease you get from eating cat feces, down syndrome, ADD/ADHD, and stupidity
• Never drown in a swimming pool or bathtub
• Always blame children for your mistakes. Unless you are in Iraq, children are never killed by the United States of America
• Sleep with as many different women as you can and impregnate them all. This gives you a higher chance of compatible organ and bone marrow donaters
• When sleeping with many different women, make them prove they do not have any of the diseases in point #2
• Never go to Walt Disney World in Florida

As long as you follow these simple instructions you should never have a problem. Congratulations on discovering the secret of life!