I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

by Jason Pargin

If reality isn’t enough to keep you interested and you find yourself constantly inventing a fake reality for yourself, you need to rethink your life. Thank you.

we’ve been trained to cling to a miserable view of the world to the point that we think that not seeing the world as miserable makes us bad people.

“And there’s the anger. People hate it when you threaten their nihilism! That’s the black box, drawing you back in. Can’t you see that it wants you to be afraid to do anything but cower in front of your screens? It only has one trick, one card to play, which is this idea that bad news is the only news you can trust. I’m telling you, if you just allow yourself to step outside of it, you’ll see it for what

is: a prison where the walls are made of nightmares.”

So much of a modern life was just sitting back helplessly and watching disaster unfold, in real time and in high definition.