The Secrecy of Need

Unpublished advances in quantitative neuropsychology led to the design of the perfect drug. No bad side effects. No good side effects. Just pure need, fine-tuned to maintain enough income and social status to maximize long-term consumption, disguised well enough that not even the addict understands.

It's not a chemical, a computer game, or electric currents through your brain. It's subtler, more effective, harder to define. Try to explain Modernism, the pattern of your childhood, what makes summer summer beyond what climatology can grasp. I can't describe this perfect drug that isn't one. I can't even want to try. I've been attempting to push myself to speak about this ever since I came across the research files from 1975. But I can't do it, and I suspect I'm not the only one. 

How many of us know with clarity of this addiction, beyond the universal near-unconscious suspicion of a plot for our lives we are neither privy to nor benefited by? I can only wonder in the forced privacies of my mind and of this journal, and hope my quiet despair is a futile rebellion and not another form of compulsion. That anything I do can be.