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

by Jason Pargin

a detail that would have been inconsequential in a rational society but would turn out to be extremely consequential in ours.

but you can’t waste your life worrying about stuff that’s not gonna happen until thirty seconds from now.

Every fantasy blockbuster has the same premise: A reluctant nobody is finally put into a position where he or she has to go on an adventure. Luke’s aunt and uncle are dead, Harry Potter’s homelife is a shit sandwich, Neo’s job sucks, Bruce Wayne’s parents got eaten by bats. 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. Now here it is! That’s your ring back there, and the realm needs you to drive it to Mordor!”

Zeke was going to take this problem to the hive mind at Reddit, the sprawling message board of mostly young males armed with a vast arsenal of shallow knowledge and free time, humming with a relentless desire to assuage their boredom by continually ingesting and digesting new morsels of information.

The fires of rage must be kept alight at all cost, and there is no justice until everyone has been sufficiently burned.

“Listen: I fully believe that I would think the way you do, if I had lived the life you’ve lived and consumed the media you’ve consumed. But I have this theory, that everything that happens on our screens is designed to do exactly what’s happening here, to repel us from one another, to create a war of all against all. It’s like a filter that only shows you others’ bad behavior, blocking the pure and letting through the poison, to make you scared of everyone who isn’t exactly identical to you. I think that, long-term, it traps your brain in a prison, that it’s designed to keep you inside, alone, with only those screens for comfort.

Knowing how you’re dumb is one of the most valuable kinds of smart there is.”

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.”

“None of the young people I know drink these days. I don’t get it. It’s unhealthy. Science agrees that it takes two drinks just to make you a normal person.”

“I totally disagree. When did that become the dream, to just be a parasite who sucks up food and electricity that other people make? Don’t you want to be great at something, to make stuff, to contribute? All I hear is, ‘Your job shouldn’t be your life!’ but why not? I mean, if you get rich, maybe you don’t charge for the work, but don’t you want to wake up every morning knowing that you’ve helped somebody? That you fixed their leaky pipes or cooked them a meal? I don’t care if you’re doing it for a corporation or the government or just for the hell of it—there’s nothing better than doing work that helps somebody. Nothing.”