Here we go again, another installment in the long-running, nauseating series titled 'The Universe Doesn't Care About Your Travel Blog.' A young Canadian woman, found on an Australian beach—the kind of sun-drenched setting usually reserved for sunscreen commercials or low-budget horror—has become the latest vessel for our collective inability to process the random, jagged nature of mortality. The girl from British Columbia, a place where people treat hiking boots as religious iconography, went to Australia to ‘find herself’ or ‘explore’ or whatever other vapid verb we use to justify burning jet fuel to escape the crushing boredom of our own personalities. Instead, she found the one thing you can find anywhere: the end.

Her father, predictably clinging to the wreckage of a shattered narrative, told the press that ‘she would have fought.’ It is a poignant line, dripping with the kind of parental denial that makes the heart ache for all of five seconds before the cynicism kicks back in. Why must they always ‘fight’? Is the tragedy somehow lessened if she simply perished in a state of bewildered shock? We demand heroism from the dead to make the living feel less like we’re standing in a queue for the same inevitable, unceremonious exit. By insisting she was a ‘fighter,’ we turn a bleak, senseless crime or accident into a three-act structure. We want our tragedies to be action movies, not the quiet, terrifying reality of a life being snuffed out in the surf while the rest of the world debates what to have for lunch. It’s a secular canonization, a way to polish the memory until it’s shiny enough to ignore the raw, ugly horror of the event itself.

Then there is the pilot’s license. The media loves this detail. She was going to be a pilot! She was going to soar above the mundane, literal ground! It’s the perfect metaphor for ‘potential,’ that most useless of human constructs. We treat ‘potential’ as if it’s a tangible asset, like a savings account that was unjustly frozen. The truth is that the universe doesn’t see potential; it only sees mass, energy, and the occasional biological anomaly that stops breathing. Whether she planned to be a pilot, a neurosurgeon, or a professional competitive eater is irrelevant to the cold physics of a beach in the early morning. Yet, the ‘adventurous young woman’ archetype is a staple of the tragedy industry. It suggests that her life had more value because she moved her body across more longitudinal lines than the average person. It’s a gross, elitist way of measuring grief, implying that if she were a homebody who enjoyed knitting and staying in her hometown, her death would be less of a ‘waste.’

Canada and Australia—two vast, sprawling colonies of a dying empire, exchanging bodies in a perpetual cycle of ‘self-discovery’ that usually involves too much cheap beer and a misplaced sense of security. We send our ‘strong and adventurous’ youth across the globe as if the mere act of traveling provides a magical shield against the banality of evil. The ‘wanderlust’ industry has sold a generation the lie that a passport is a personality and that ‘exploring’ is a substitute for actually being someone. So, she went to the beach. And the beach, being a collection of minerals and water indifferent to her dreams of flight or her father’s belief in her combat skills, did what beaches do. It remained.

Ultimately, this isn't a story about a woman; it’s a story about the stories we tell ourselves to avoid looking at the abyss. We talk about her ‘spirit’ because we can’t handle the silence of her absence. We talk about her ‘fight’ because we are terrified of our own vulnerability. We talk about her ‘future’ because we are too cowardly to admit that the present is all any of us ever actually has, and even that is a fragile, flickering light. The Left will probably find a way to make this about systemic safety, and the Right will use it as a prompt for border control or some other moronic obsession, but both sides miss the point: Life is a brief, often confusing trek toward a destination we all reach, and no amount of ‘adventurous’ labeling or pilot’s licenses can change the fact that the sand doesn't care who it’s holding. It’s a tragedy, sure, but the real comedy is our desperate need to find a script in a scriptless void.