What Kind of Paradise

by Janelle Brown

Everyone just staring at screens until their eyes fall out. Someone needs to stop this nonsense, before it gets out of control. They call it progress but they’re blinkered idiots, the whole world is just going about blithely ignoring how this”—he waved the instruction manual in the air, like a priest gesticulating with a religious text—“is going to utterly shift human existence as we know it. They’re just ushering in their own obsolescence.”

And that was the beauty of it all: Your Web page was valued less by how it looked than what it contained within. Content truly was king, as the saying went.

The more we continue to replace a life of value with the “virtual” life, the less satisfaction we derive from our existence, resulting in a world in which citizens are anesthetized by pharmaceuticals and entertainment, living entirely in their heads rather than in a tangible, physical world.

The more you come to know about the world, the less it makes sense; and the more you wish you could just climb right back inside your mother’s arms and hide there, an oblivious kid, forever.

“Well, we’re all strangers to each other, when you get down to it. It’s just that we sometimes choose not to be.” He shrugged. “I’m choosing not.”