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

by Jason Pargin

Abbott Coburn had spent much of his twenty-six years dreading the wrong things, in the wrong amounts, for the wrong reasons. So it was appropriate that in his final hours before achieving international infamy, he was dreading a routine trip he’d accepted as a driver for the rideshare service Lyft.

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

You can decide for yourself whether a homemade radiation sign is scarier than an official one.”

“Never challenge a man in a Buick. He’s got nothin’ to lose.”

“Instead of just saying what you’d prefer, you off-load the choice to someone or something else. Instead of ‘I don’t want to hang out with you,’ it’s ‘I have work that night’ or ‘I’m not feeling well.’ Nothing is ever expressed as your own needs and wants, so you never have to defend your choices or own the consequences later.

Sure, you don’t want to do the work right now, during the hard part. Nobody does! But the real ‘you’ doesn’t exist in the moment; you exist in the long term. That you, the whole you, will be glad you did this.”

adhering to his habit of including far more pairs of underwear than he’d need as if he were going to just be continually soiling himself amid a nationwide shortage of pairs for purchase.

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

a boxy LEGO figure of a man who had probably looked like an FBI agent in his mother’s ultrasound.

my gut is telling me that it’s either a nothingburger or an all-hands-on-deck crisis and absolutely nothing in between.

You know what a lot of retired feds get into? Alcoholism. It’s not just for the boys anymore. I went to Whole Foods the other day—they’ve replaced twenty percent of their floor space with shelves of mom wine. You should give it a shot. They call it a disease, but the sufferers seem to be having a great time.”

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.

You’re nervous, and in America, guns are mainly talismans against anxiety.

Real friendships, real bonds are based on being genuine and vulnerable and flawed around each other, but we’re constantly told that’s dangerous. Ask yourself, who benefits from that? Who wants a society where there are no strong bonds between individuals?

Your brain needs quiet to process all the stuff that happened, and these days, you never give it a chance. Unless we’re bathing or sleeping, it’s a nonstop stream of new input with no time to process the old.

“Twenty-two bombs,” said Ether, “to clear a way for 40 through the Bristol Mountains. Boom, boom, boom, boom. That’s what’s unique about humans. We see a mountain range in our way and we’re like, ‘Absolutely not.’”

“I’m sensing that you’re one of those people who did hallucinogens one time and suddenly discovered the great love that connects the universe.” “No! I did them a bunch of times, over months.

it’s a trait of the human species that we can’t be in a spot for more than a few minutes without producing some kind of waste.

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.”

Key’s tenure had been marred by turmoil, beginning with a mandate to summarize the threat from left-wing extremists, to which she had made the ill-advised comment, “You’re worried about an uprising from a population that needs four different antianxiety prescriptions to order a pizza over the phone?”

these modern attacks were a grab bag of loosely held beliefs that secretly all pointed in the same direction: a desire to destroy the ability and willingness of individuals to gather in public and form communities. They were attacks on social cohesion,

it turned out that Key’s actual favorite hobby was buying supplies for hobbies.

At this point, I think my meds’ side effects should qualify as a disease all on their own. But if I don’t take them, it feels like there’s a shrieking car alarm going off right next to my ears twenty-four hours a day. I mean, 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.

our interactions could be totally great the whole time and you’d find it just as exhausting because the world has trained you to be afraid of being fully and truly perceived.

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.

Damn it, thought Malort, this is what happens when you start posting cops in the schools; the kids just take their school shootings outside.

if he were about to die, he was going to go out how he’d lived: with absolutely no idea what the hell was going on.

You know those postapocalyptic zombie shows where they have to cross the wastelands and they’re like, ‘We can’t trust anybody out here! We’re on our own!’ Well, that’s a geek fantasy for indoor kids.

Trust is the only advantage humans have as a species, that millions of us can all get together and trust one another. Yes, including weird people you just met earlier in the day.”

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.

Almost all of these people are just like you. They want to do the right thing, and every morning, they wake up and go do it. Every. Single. Day.”

people are going to preserve that version of you, from the part of your life when they felt the most superior to you.”

She was not, of course, reading a book, but endlessly scrolling, scrolling, scrolling on her phone for Navigator news, substituting knowledge for action,

If your entire worldview is “Don’t tread on me,” what’s going to happen when a leader tries to impose rules?

You’d think they’d learn to put their differences aside for the cause, but that’s hard to do when you’ve been raised to believe there’s no such thing as a minor disagreement.

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 ty...

As Patrick used to say, we’re all just babies trapped in God’s hot parked car.

He would have tried to rein in the bullshit, but it was a rule of the internet that any efforts to censor content only gave it credibility. The human brain loves novelty and excitement and, well, what’s more novel than a weird lie somebody pulled straight out of their ass? And what’s more exciting than forbidden knowledge, defying the authorities to uncover what they tried to keep hidden?

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.”

Eric Harris was himself a bully, a standard-issue predator who was destined to kill somebody, someday. But the other kid, Dylan Klebold, he was just a rudderless depressed teenager who, as far as anybody can tell, went along with it because it was something to do. I’m not saying Abbott is that first one, but you’d be surprised by how many of us can be that second one under the right circumstances.

“That ‘stranger danger’ paranoia came from the suburbs, parents in perfect neighborhoods terrified that child-trafficking rings would steal their kid if they let them out of their sight for ten seconds. I would say, ‘Imagine what that does to a child growing up?’ but I don’t have to imagine, between the two of us, we have like six amber bottles of brain meds and zero coping skills. Now those same boomers are like, ‘Why don’t you go outside? Why are you looking at your screens all the time?’ These are the same people who started this trend of never letting kids go out on their own because their screens told them the streets were full of monsters.

“If aliens landed, they’d think only cars lived here.”

It’s a historical fact that one of the key precursors to mass violence in a society is simply an excess of young, unmarried men.

Through all of history, wars were a way to burn off your excess young men, like venting heat from an engine.

Key believed the world was full of crazy men who were kept tethered to reality by sane women, though this was the kind of thing that, again, never got a great reaction when said around the office.

in isolation, human minds tend to get strange, like a self-portrait painted from memory, in the dark, using a live snake as a brush.

“Abbott, what are you talking about? What—what’s just happened here? You just invented a person to get mad at in your head and then declared me to be that person.”

“If I were to tell you that your ratio of evidence to wishful thinking is roughly the same as you’d find in a bottle of a homeopathic aphrodisiac, would that be an example of mansplaining or gaslighting? I’m trying to be something other than a boorish obstacle in your journey while also not following you off a cliff.”

as a country, we’re in a national sleep deprivation crisis, blue light from our phones ruining our natural cycles. We’re a whole society of tired, cranky, anxious people. No wonder we all think the world is ending.”