If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe (John Dies at the End, #4)

by Jason Pargin

Sometimes when life’s Warning Light won’t stop flashing, the best thing you can do is just put some electrician’s tape over it.

“That little kids’ game,” said Marconi, “was developed by neuroscientists who are experts on the addictive nature of dopamine release intervals. They believed they were simply boosting ‘engagement’ by making the software as addictive as possible to young minds. But gods and devils gain their strength by subsuming the will of followers, by the molding of human behavior to their own ends. This software manipulates will on an astonishing scale, locking in the user to performing mindless, repetitive tasks instead of living out their own purpose as human beings. Watch anyone on their smartphone and tell me their state of mind can be called anything other than a ‘trance.’”

The most effective manipulation always comes with the illusion of choice; it feels less like a whip and more like quenching a thirst.

The devil is real, but he doesn’t turn up in a red suit with hooves. You have to imagine him as like a disease that you get—you pass it on and you don’t even know it. Educated people don’t call it the devil; they call it trauma. It rewires your brain and tries to spread itself down to the next generation and the one after that, the pain rolling down through time.