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Serotonin is the chemical which makes us actually want to listen and connect with idiotic and pointless people on the internet — the glue that glues us to the insipid stream of opinions. Man, I really hate it; I hate that it does its work on me, keeps me scrolling on Twitter or Facebook or Medium beyond that point at which I’m full the point of being sick. You find the same kind of thinking — the same kind of callow, calculating, largely semantic, prognostication and intellectual showboating — everywhere; the trolls attached to the soft underbelly of popular pseudo-intellectuals like little fish trailing after a shark… I wish I could write about something other than the Internet — but I will only once I’ve broken the habit of giving my attention and goodwill to the Internet, that disruptive organism…. There is a false comfort in living online. I can feel how easy it is to let one’s intellectual muscles grow soft, how easy it is to slot oneself into the endless chain of pointless commentary and to stop thinking and observing and feeling as an individual…. Are there any individuals anymore? it seems like this whole crisis would be solved in a second if people could break the chains of mental dependence and act as autonomous agents — and stop waiting for some science-concocted miracle, some government concocted miracle. There should be a billion vegetable gardens sprouting around the world; there should be a billion saplings planted in a billion yards; there should be a hundred million handwritten letters finding their way to loved ones. But instead the herd piles onto sub-Reddits and into sub-tweets and onto Facebook walls — all for the sake of that reassuring little chemical pulse. Humanity is a new growth forest: homogeneous, fragile, ahistorical.
