This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It (John Dies at the End, #2)

by David Wong

And social media, well, that shit feels specifically designed to cause our primate brains to overheat and go spraying out of our ears like a busted radiator: “Here is an out-of-context video of a stranger behaving horribly in a Dunkin’ Donuts 2,000 miles away; you are now required to spend emotional energy caring about this.” I think our present state of ceaseless anxiety is largely rooted in the fact that modern society requires us to do something we should by all rights find physically impossible: to peacefully coordinate and cooperate with hundreds of coworkers, thousands of neighbors, and millions of fellow citizens simultaneously. If everyday life feels overwhelming, that’s because it literally is that. You weren’t built to handle it, and lots of otherwise inexplicable human behaviors are just coping mechanisms. Isn’t the point of stereotypes, both good and bad, that they let us count an entire category of humans as a single personality (and thus only occupy one of our precious relationship slots)?