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

by Jason Pargin

Generally, if you can project enough confidence and purpose, all the uncertain nerds of the world will just part like the Red Sea.

He felt a weight roll off him, the exquisite relief of canceled plans that extroverts will never know.

The dream isn’t that the chance for adventure will come along—you can do an adventure any time you want—but that circumstances will line up just right so that you simply have no more excuses.

“Are you honestly telling me you’re not bored? Like, every day? Your phone can numb the feeling moment-to-moment, but it’s still there in the long term, the boredom.

Did you know that placebos still work even if you tell the patient it’s fake? I feel like that says something really important about humans, that performing a belief in something is the same as believing it.

Abbott allowed himself to relax just a bit, returning to the baseline level of anxiety dictated by the circumstances and human existence in general.

You treat every conversation starter as a pop quiz you’re scared you’re going to fail.”

but what was life but a series of hard jobs you had to endure because you’d screwed up the easy ones?

She’d spent her entire adult life having her ears blasted by a clarion cry repeated in a thousand different forms, alternating the same two lines: “Something must be done.” “Nothing can be done.”

But nothing ruins your view of the world like getting your dream job.

it’s no surprise there’s a pill shortage; that’s what happens when you build a society that can only be survived if you either have a super-specific type of brain or a prescription to block out the chaos.

When they’d met, Ether had joked/claimed that she could read Abbott’s thoughts, and she probably could, because everyone could. Teachers knew when he was lying, guys knew when he was scared, girls knew when he was indulging lecherous fantasies. It had always made him feel like everyone else had a sense organ he was lacking because it never went the other way. He could never sense when someone else was being disingenuous or stringing him along so they could mock him later. Of course he hated socializing; that information imbalance was terrifying.

Here was another familiar sensation, of being humiliated down to a level lower than he’d previously thought existed. When you’re so far down the social ladder that you’re basically lying on the floor, that’s when they love to stomp you the most, to grind your face into the shit.

He’d spent half of his life sensing he was in someone’s way and the other half actually being in someone’s way but failing to sense it.

I have a whole mental library of stuff that weirds out strangers; I have to be careful how I dole it out.

If you think that, say, a cashier failing to wish you a Merry Christmas is a sign of impending Christian genocide, you’re probably not the type to hash out differences over brunch.

That’s just how the brain works: It wants to shape everything into a narrative. Once you realize that, the whole world starts to make more sense. Or less sense.”

a burst of short-term pleasure will blind the subject to its long-term well-being and cause it to function as little more than a puppet.

The modern religion of consumerist instant gratification, on the other hand, serves only the masters for whom the zombified subjects make perfect cattle, relinquishing their freedom and individuality in exchange for the next paltry release of soothing opiates. The effects wear off sooner with each dose, each time leaving the subject hungry and ashamed, a sort of post-ejaculate clarity that in the moment reveals the true state of its abject slavery, making the victim all the more eager to submit fully to the only source of pleasure and comfort it has ever known.

To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me.

“Do I need an attorney?” The answer to this question is actually yes, every time, regardless of whether you’re being interviewed as a suspect or a witness, as law enforcement absolutely does not have to tell you which one you are.

Thanks to Hollywood, suspects thought that you always got read your rights upon arrest (the detective saying, “You have the right to remain silent,” as he slaps on the cuffs makes for a nice dramatic moment). In reality, the Miranda warning only happens if you’re being interviewed in custody. If they choose to interview you without being in custody—say, if they show up to your workplace under the guise of having a casual conversation—they don’t have to read you any rights at all.

When you live alone, you’re free to decorate the space with your madness.

Abbott had left an empty life and entered a void.

“I feel like that kind of obsession with neatness is just one more way to deal with anxiety. If you feel like you have no control over the world, then you tend to obsessively control the things you—”

People who had rough childhoods, guys like you and me, you grow up scared of being happy. It don’t feel right. You find yourself sabotaging it, because you’re so scared that you’re gonna lose it that you’d rather just trash it yourself, so at least you can say it was your choice. So, you go hunting for grievances, to give yourself an excuse.”

The most important thing to understand about spending your whole life in mortal fear of being in Big Trouble is that it’s not an irrational phobia—Abbott was constantly getting caught. The rough-edged kids could indulge their darkest desires because they had instincts for getting away with it; they could lie and charm and intimidate. The good kids didn’t even have dark desires that needed indulging; they glided through a world that fit them like a glove, wanting for themselves nothing beyond what polite society wanted them to want. It was the ones like Abbott who were stuck in the middle, forever to be the world’s punching bag. He was bored by everything normal but lacked the tools to survive excursions into the dangerous and exotic. Now, as always, he would be the one they made an example of.

He knew he should be paranoid, but wasn’t certain of just how paranoid to be, which of course is how paranoia works.

“That’s another game the cynics play. ‘Because this objectively true thing has been said too many times by unoriginal thinkers, we have to reject it and make ourselves miserable just to spite them.’”

“And if you should find yourself in a group of friends who are all united under a cause that makes them miserable, then losing those friends wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. The wrong friends can make you lonelier than being alone.”

There’s an old saying that a child not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth. I’d update it to say the child not sufficiently entertained by the village will burn it down for the spectacle.”

Miles had quickly decided that he’d been born into a society that was very much a solvable puzzle. The powerful wanted to hold down everyone else, but they were not clever and could be defied if the clever were willing to break their arbitrary rules.