TV SHOW REVIEW: Supernatural S04E17 "It's a Terrible Life"

Dean and Sam are swept in a new world. Both working in a call center company but seemingly unaware of each other or their past. Dean is the director for sales and marketing while Sam works as a technical support agent.

When two employees of the company committed suicide after receiving an e-mail purportedly from the HR department ordering them to visit said office at room 1444, Sam begins to question things. The duo investigates room 1444 and finds an employee down on his back with a steel cabinet on his top. As Dean and Sam try to save the employee a ghost appears, that of P.T. Sandover,  founder of the company. Both Dean and Sam are able to fend off the spirit, both seemed to know that iron and salt works on ghosts.

Sam begins to increasingly doubt his life, his career, and his way of life. Dean too feels the same way. Both felt they were called to a different life, a life vanguishing evil.

This got me thinking, we do indeed feel it when the life we live is not the life we truly want. What do I want? The great mythologist Joseph Campbell once said that life is not the search for meaning but the experience of being alive. Campbell said in his interview by Bill Moyers (set into a book titled "The Power of Myth") that in order to be happy in life, we have to follow our bliss, because when we do, we come to bliss. To be trite, it means to be living a fulfilling and contented life.

Sounds simple? I think not because knowing what we want is to know to listen to ourselves, and in a world distracted by the bewildering array of technology and materialism, this is a challenge. A challenge we have to eventually face for if we refuse or cannot do so, life indeed becomes terrible.