Dark Pattern (The Naturalist, #4)

by Andrew Mayne

I know we all have a dark side, the part of us that’s fascinated by the things that should frighten us. For some of us it’s curiosity—that compulsion that makes us want to look when we see an accident on the side of the road and spot a group of people standing over a body. It’s the reason some of us wake up to read the news. We don’t rush to make sure a tsunami didn’t wipe out a South Pacific island. Reading that an earthquake didn’t kill two thousand people in Turkey wouldn’t trigger any dopamine receptors in our brains. When the news feels too normal, we stop paying attention. But bad news grabs us by the throat—which we willingly bare—especially when it’s the kind of news that feels proximal but somehow doesn’t quite touch us.

Perhaps this explains why people love vampire stories or women write to serial killers in prison. We all like to come close to death but not actually touch it. Maybe there’s some little survival lesson we can learn, or perhaps our brain makes us think that we’re somehow winning by not dying. I’m sure there’s some evolutionary advantage to wanting to get close enough to death and evil to gain some awareness without getting too close. Maybe seeing how that person died on the side of the road will remind us to look both ways. Maybe learning a fishing village was wiped out makes us feel better about our expensive mortgage or not living in a fault zone. Maybe our lizard brain can’t tell the difference between our choices and our random circumstances well enough to know that bad stuff sometimes just happens and no matter what perverse pleasure you get in knowing it didn’t happen to you . . . it can.

“Pay attention. If something sounds suspicious, ask questions. Don’t ignore it just because everyone else does. Our tools give us capabilities the rest of the public can’t even imagine. If we’re not vigilant, something bad could happen, and we might find those capabilities taken from us. I make mistakes. You make mistakes. Don’t run from them. Seek them out. Correct them. Listen when someone is telling you something is suspicious. Don’t ignore it.”