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Phrase: Eaten alive
No, this is not Shark Week at ArtisanEnglish.jp.
If the title eaten alive caught your attention, and you’re here looking for blood and guts, you may be disappointed.
However, if you are looking for heartache, disappointment and broken dreams, you’ve come to the right place.
When someone is eaten alive, they are destroyed, defeated or dominated by someone or something much stronger than them.
It often happens to young people who leave a small hometown and head for the bright lights of the big city.
They are full of plans, dreams and aspirations, but once they get to the city, they learn the hard lesson that cities are tough places to survive.
Daily life in a big city is like participating in a cage match where it’s dog eat dog, and only the strong survive.
Sure, many can adapt to city life, but some are eaten alive and eventually, battered and beaten, run back to the countryside with their tails between their legs.
It doesn’t matter if they leave the Smoky Mountains in North Carolina for New York City, North Battleford, Saskatchewan for Toronto, or Hirokawa Cho, Wakayama for Tokyo.
If you are not prepared for the hardship and competition of a big city, you will be eaten alive and spit out like a piece of cheap chewing gum.
I know two people here in Wakayama who went to Tokyo with dreams of grandeur but returned less than a year later, swearing they would never set foot in Tokyo again.
Big cities are tough places; if you’re not cut out for city life, they will eat you alive.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least an 8th-grade education (age 13 – 14).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 67.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.