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

by Jason Pargin

If pleasure was a thing that could be measured, the available pleasure to the average person over all of history would basically be a flat line on a graph that then explodes upward right before you and I were born. In terms of timing, we’re fucking lottery winners! Only we know the pleasure of a climate-controlled room, a daily hot shower, of cheap and delicious food and drink, of comfortable shoes and a dazzling ocean of entertainment so vast that we get stressed out trying to keep up. Like music! Music is magic, it heals the soul, and our access to it is infinitely greater than it ever was before! And literature—the most beautiful works from the most incredible minds are out there to be read on demand, at almost no cost. And then there’s all the little conveniences we instantly took for granted. The ability to read a review of a product you’re buying only goes back to Amazon; before that, for all of history, you were just shopping blind. And think about Wikipedia; the guy who invented that deserves a Nobel Prize—it’s one of the great inventions in history, and the fact that it’s free to use is insane. They didn’t even have that in Star Trek!”