"Far beyond, in the unexplored confines of the most tacky region of the Western Edge of this Galaxy, there is a small, yellow and forgotten sun. Spinning around this sun, at a distance of about 148 million kilometers, there is an absolutely insignificant blue and green planet, whose primate-descendant lifestyles are so extraordinarily primitive that they still think digital clocks are a great idea. This planet has - or rather had - the following problem: most of its inhabitants were almost always unhappy. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of them were basically consistent of the movement of small pieces of colored paper with printed numbers, which is curious, since in general it was not the pieces of colored paper that felt unhappy. And so the problem remained unsolved. Many people were bad, and most of them were very unhappy, even those with digital watches. More and more people believed that it had been a terrible mistake for the species to come down from the trees. Some said that even climbing the trees had been a bad idea, and that no one should ever have left the sea."
-Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)