Everything Is F*cked(22)

He realized that he valued no one—not even himself—and this brought him an overwhelming sense of loneliness and grief, because no amount of logic and calculation could ever compensate for the gnawing desperation of his Feeling Brain’s never-ending struggle to find hope in this world.

I would love to tell you that Parallel Universe Newton, or Emo Newton, overcame his sadness and solitude. I would love to tell you that he learned to value himself and others. But like our universe’s Isaac Newton, Parallel Universe Newton would spend the rest of his days alone, grumpy, and miserable.

The questions both Newtons answered that summer of 1666 had perplexed philosophers and scientists for generations. Yet, in a matter of a few months, this cantankerous, antisocial twenty-three-year-old had uncovered the mystery, had cracked the code. And there, on the frontiers of intellectual discovery, he tossed his findings aside to a musty and forgotten corner of a cramped study, in a remote backwater village a day’s ride north of London.

And there, his discoveries would remain, hidden to the world, collecting dust.48





Chapter 4


How to Make All Your Dreams Come True


Imagine this: it’s 2:00 a.m. and you’re still awake on the couch, staring bleary-eyed and foggy-brained at the television. Why? You don’t know. Inertia simply makes it easier to sit there and keep watching than to get up and go to bed. So, you watch.

Perfect. This is how I get you: when you’re feeling apathetic and lost and completely passive in the face of your fate. Nobody sits up staring at a TV at 2:00 a.m. if they have important shit to do the next day. Nobody struggles with the will to move their ass off the couch for hours on end unless they’re having some sort of inner crisis of hope. And it’s exactly this crisis that I want to speak to.

I appear on your TV screen. I’m a whirlwind of energy. There are loud, obnoxious colors, cheesy sound effects. I’m practically shouting. Yet, somehow, my smile is easy and relaxed. I’m comforting. It’s as though I’m making eye contact with you and only you:

“What if I told you that I could solve all your problems?” I say.

Pfft, puh-lease, you think. You don’t know the half of my problems, buddy.

“What if I told you I know how to make all your dreams come true?”

Riiiiight, and I’m the fucking tooth fairy.

“Look, I know how you feel,” I say.

Nobody knows how I feel, you reflexively tell yourself, surprised at how automatic the response is.

“I, too, once felt lost,” I say. “I felt alone, isolated, hopeless. I, too, used to lie awake at night for no particular reason, wondering if there was something wrong with me, wondering what was this invisible force standing between myself and my dreams. And I know that’s what you’re feeling, too. That you’ve somehow lost something. You just don’t know what.”

In truth, I say these things because they are experienced by everybody. They are a fact of the human condition. We all feel powerless to equalize with the inherent guilt that comes with our existence. We all suffer and are victimized to varying degrees, especially when we’re young. And we all spend a lifetime trying to compensate for that suffering.

And in moments of our life when things aren’t going so well, this makes us despair.

But like most people struggling, you’ve enveloped yourself so much in your pain that you’ve forgotten that pain is common, and that your strife is not uniquely yours—on the contrary, it’s universal. And because you’ve forgotten this, you feel as if I’m speaking directly to you; as if, by some magical power, I’m peering into your soul and reading back to you the contents of your heart. For this, you sit up and at attention.

“Because,” I repeat, “I have the solution to all your problems. I can make all your dreams come true.” Now I’m pointing, and my finger looks gigantic on your TV screen. “I have all the answers. I have the secret of everlasting happiness and eternal life, and it’s this . . .”

What I go on to say is so outlandish, so ridiculous, so absolutely perverse and cynical that you actually think it might be true. The problem is, you want to believe me. You need to believe me. I represent the hope and salvation your Feeling Brain desperately craves, that it needs. So, slowly, your Thinking Brain comes to the conclusion that my idea is so batshit crazy that it just might work.

As the infomercial drags on, that existential need to find meaning somewhere, anywhere, beats down your psychological defenses and lets me in. After all, I have demonstrated an uncanny knowledge of your pain, a backdoor entrance to your secret truth, a deep vein traveling through your heart. You then realize that in between all my big white teeth and shouty words, I’ve spoken to you: I was once just as fucked as you . . . and I found my way out. Come with me.

I keep going. I’m on a roll now. The camera angles are switching back and forth, grabbing me now from the side, now from the front. Suddenly, there’s a studio audience in front of me. They’re wrapped up in every word I say. A woman is crying. A man’s jaw drops. And yours drops with it. I’m all up in your shit now. I will give you permanent fulfillment, motherfucker. I will fill any gap, plug any hole. Just sign up for one low price. What is happiness worth to you? What is hope worth to you? Act now, fucker.

Sign up. Today.

With that, you grab your phone. You go to the website. You put in the digits.