Tardigrades, or water bears, as they call themselves, are awesome micro-animals (i.e., they are tiny, and can only be seen under a microscope, yet they even have basic eyes). It is pretty cool to be a micro-animal already, and even better to look like the one from the illustration, but there’s more!
Imagine that you walk with a water bear, and feel free to pick your favourite time and place ever. Bring your imaginary friends, too! Now, let’s consider a few scenarios:
A nearby nuclear reactor explodes; if you are lucky, you die fast. The water bear continues to walk.
Suddenly the air pressure becomes six times of that from the deepest oceanic trenches – that is, over 6000 times the usual atmospheric pressure. Your lungs would probably explode if you will not collapse before managing to inhale (but you will, and your guts will claim independence); the water bear will be fine.
The air temperature rises above the water boiling point. You get boiled from inside and slightly baked from outside, the tardigrade glances at your remains dismissingly.
The air temperature quickly drops to about the absolute zero; you have a few moments to experience a rare sensation (or not that rare – a quick agony, maybe?), and to wonder how the world would look like through your frozen eyes; the tardigrade gets a new ice slide.
Food and water supplies disappear for years; the tardigrade will be hungry alone for most of that time.
The atmosphere disappears, the Earth becomes more like most of the other rocks in space (alternatively, the Earth disappears together with its atmosphere); guess who survives and forgets that you ever existed.
Basically:
Water bear doesn’t care
(The picture is borrowed, resized, and backed up for future generations from Beatrice the Biologist, and there is more there).
That guy suggests to be more like tardigrades. Well, not to survive anywhere, but along the lines of carpe diem – because tardigrades are also wiser than humans. That’s one of the reasons why they are eutelic (their bodies consist of a constant number of cells), so that their perfection doesn’t get loose.
The next time you will be cold, lonely, bored, in pain, or otherwise unhappy – try to imagine that you are a tardigrade. Sometimes it helps.