Being alive is *great*, actually.
That's a fact, an undeniable, indisputable fact, though it can be a bit hard to see, perceive, and truly grasp. Life can be *pretty* miserable at times; after all, the hapless contestants of the Battle for Dream Island had been... Battling for Dream Island. For over a decade. And by the time any one of them actually 'won'- they got *remarkably* close back at the start, but then Leafy stole the island and there was a whole song and dance and so everything just continued on -things had gotten so warped, so completely and utterly messed up, that they weren't even fighting for the eponymous Dream Island anymore. They were Battling for... Battle for Dream Island. Actually, it got even worse than that: They were Battling for Battle for Battle for Dream Island. That's *three* whole layers of Battling for Dream Island, and that's three layers of misery. Just... one right on top of the other. In all that time they've been through basically anything and everything one could *possibly* go through in life, and then a little bit more just for kicks. Besides the 2,763 challenges they had to do, they've also had to endure being stuck in a metal box for years, they had to endure being stuck inside some infernal pocket dimension solely controlled by the world's most powerful child, they had to endure being spun around in the air for who knows how long, and so on, and so forth, ad *nauseam*.
Life can be terrible. Life can be *so* terrible. Life can be *very* terrible. Life can be *excruciatingly* terrible. But at the end of the day, life is still... life. They're alive. They're conscious. They may not be well, but at the very least they can *tell* that they aren't well. From what they've seen, only an *exceedingly* small, incredibly minuscule amount of... *things* in the universe have ever gotten the privilege of being alive. Those people in question run the whole gamut of things in the universe, from foodstuffs to cubes to gemstones to numerals, but they *all* share that incredibly unique ability to perceive themselves as those things. Someone like Leafy could look around and see *countless* amounts of her distant relatives and cousins. Teardrop has *so* much family that their sudden and inexplicable appearance, falling out of the sky, is just a regular occurrence on this strange planet. Not a *single* one of them has any sense of being alive, not in the slightest. They couldn't care less if they get ripped apart, or if they melt, or if they 'die' in any of 2,763 (and a bit more) different ways. But *they* can. They can walk, they can talk, they can do a whole bunch of other things. They can perceive the entirety of the universe, all the wonders and sights. A wise person once said that there's a life out there to enjoy- so enjoy it -and if they just stopped to think about it for any more than a fraction of a second, if they just realized *just* how lucky they were to be in such a situation like this, they'd be enjoying it every day of their lives.
But there were plenty of other reasons to celebrate, of course. None can be quite as potent as the realization that your very existence is the statistical abnormality to end all abnormalities, perhaps the most extraordinary thing to ever happen in the vastness of the universe, but they *are* a bit easier to grasp, a bit easier to comprehend. For one, there was a time *before* the Battle for Dream Island. It seems hard to believe now, given that they've spent so long competing, but it *is* true. That's just one of the ways time works. All things have a beginning and an end. Even the cosmos themselves was birthed into existence at some point, and it will all come crashing down after an *exceedingly* long time; what happens before and after that time, on the other hand, is a topic of *much* debate, one that is only discussed by the likes of Golf Ball and the other *nerds*. And they're all far away at the moment, battling for The Power of Two. As a result, everything within the universe *also* has a time limit, regardless of whether or not they want it or not. There was a time before the Earth came to be, before Goiky, before living objects, before the Battle for Dream Island. And there's going to be a time *after* those things as well, but that's all in the future at the moment, so they can just pretend that it doesn't exist.
