Arete

“Martin, tell me a story of those days,” Jack asked.

“Which days are you talking about?” Martin said.

“The years past 2020.”

“Fifty years ago.”

“Yes.”

“Well, what do you want to know? What haven’t you seen in the pipeline yet?”

“What were people like?”

“Well, they were a lot like us. Kind of darting from experience to experience. There was a bit more physicality back then, more manual labor for sure.”

“Before we had automated manufacturing.”

“Yes. It was supposed to make things a lot simpler, but... it didn’t. It made things worse. There were mass layoffs. It made people uneasy about life in general enough to riot. They call the generation of men the second lost generation.” Martin’s face was stern and solemn.

“Did they figure out what to do with these disaffected men?”

“Not at first—and many died by suicide, cirrhosis, preventable heart disease and stress. Lives unfulfilled, overdosing on pain meds and drinking themselves to death.”

“Why didn’t people do anything?”

“They did. They wrote about it and changed the compassionate care laws and eventually more funding for welfare and job retraining. Yet, the problem with the opioid crisis was demand. Address the ancillary externalities of a problem and you still have the cause or the root of it. A malaise of the soul. Yes, support was needed, but overall, a better social structure and the end of work as a religion and a end-all, be-all. A place within the community.”

“A reason for being.”

“Yes. A reason to wake up in the morning, and think, wow, I can accomplish something today. A positive goal and intrinsic drive to do well. That kind of purpose doesn’t go away. It sustains, nourishes, and supports.”

“And where are we now? Are we not at the mercy of the pipeline?”

“You could say that. You could say that the machines inform our very purpose.”

“What happened to us?”

“We were downloaded into the memory archives. All of us. All of human desire, all of human yearning and pursuit. Depression, anxiety, happiness, elation, ennui, dysthymia, cyclothymia, loneliness. These emotions collapsed into neurological drives and discrete units of feeling. It was enough to replicate the real thing and supplant it if necessary. No need for drugs.”

“But did the drives replace or replicate reality?”

“They served as an outlet. There wasn’t a need for pharmacological abuse anymore. It was simply download and go. Once they had solved the latency and the brain issue, the connection was established enough to recreate entire emotional experiences from scratch.”

“Thus the people living in their own worlds.”

“Quite literally. A space of their own reality.”

“Did it make it easy to escape reality?”

“Yes. Imagine the worst cancer diagnosis, and the ensuing pain and palliative care necessitated by a terminal illness. Imagine the kinds of horrors people had to live through 50 years ago.”

“Actual emotional pain.”

“In droves. It was draining. It was overrated, not ennobling. Some almost even desired pain, claiming it could form some protective cocoon of mental toughness. It was madness. Getting stuck in quicksand once doesn’t make you less likely to fall into one later. It just means you had a shitty experience. No need to ascribe some higher meaning to it after the fact.”

“You mean a religious meaning.”

“Pain is no offering to the gods, and those that asserted so--the grotesquery of their beliefs became evident after a while.”

“And yet, how do you comfort a person in pain?”

“There are no good answers. There’s acknowledgement of what’s going on. But the words escape. The words do not hold; they are not malleable enough to accommodate that level of feeling. Any expression would be tortuous: ‘I feel your pain’ or ‘I’m sorry for your loss’ or ‘I know how you feel’ Not just meaningless, these phrases evinced a betrayal of the truth--back then, you really couldn’t know how someone felt in their head.”

“Until virtual reality.”

“Yep. The virtual realities were a relief from the religious suffering of the day-to-day and the suffering was just another choice of virtual realities.”

“Finally, the implementation of choice.” Martin smiled.