|
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.
Truth and salvation and everlasting happiness. It’s all yours. It’s coming to
you. Are you ready?
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
