Survival Isn’t for the Strongest.

I watched Thrash on Netflix last night and one thing stuck with me long after the credits.

There’s a scene where a pregnant woman is trapped in a submerged car. Three grown, able-bodied men jump in to save her — and one by one, the sharks take them. She eventually gets pulled out by Dakota, a teenage girl. And if that wasn’t wild enough — the woman delivered her baby. Not a scratch on either of them.

Then there’s Mr. Olson and his wife. Big, authoritative people. The kind you’d bet on in a crisis. They spent most of the film trying to abandon their foster kids to save themselves. The kids, the ones they maltreated — somehow make it. Mr. Olson and his wife? The sharks got them both.

The movie kept flipping the script on who deserves to survive versus who actually does.

And I think that’s real life honestly.

We’ve been sold this idea that survival goes to the fittest, the strongest, the bravest, the most prepared. But watching this film, I kept thinking: sometimes it’s just the favored. The lucky. The ones life chose for no obvious reason.

Not the three men. Dakota.

Not Mr. Olson and his wife. The foster kids they looked down on.

It’s a little unsettling when you sit with it. Because it means bravery doesn’t guarantee anything. Strength doesn’t either. Sometimes you just… make it. And sometimes you don’t. And there’s no clean formula for why.

And then they closed the film with I Can See Clearly Now, and honestly? Perfect. After all that chaos, darkness, and loss, that song hits differently. It felt like an exhale. Like the movie was saying: the storm passes. It always does. You just have to still be there when it does.