No stories are real. Even real stories are unreal.

All stories in this series are about a fictional “I” character.

I have a friend called Aman. Aman is the right name for him because he is a man. A man. A typical man. What is a man, anyway? A typical man, IMO, is no different from an artificial intelligence. There is a facade of awareness, but deep down, it’s simply a product of algorithms that have been fed into him. My friend Aman wears clothes that social media influencers promote, he can’t go to any restaurant without Yelp reviews and he presumes higher ratings are tastier (he doesn’t trust his tongue anymore), he watches only those movies with high IMDB ratings, he dates only those girls his friends would woo and he tweets about only those news that he sees have been tweeted by those whom he thought were big people but were actually other versions of Aman. His girlfriend and expectations from girlfriend are dictated not by his wishes, but by what social media has been feeding him. His vote is not based on who he thinks will take the country to the right direction, but based on who others have been advocating for. His career choices are dictated by others. And those “others” who he follows are themselves following what they believe will make them popular among the herd. This whole ecosystem is like the head of the snake eating its own tail.

Chuck P. said in his book Invisible Monsters:

“It’s because we’re so trapped in our culture, in the being of being human on this planet with the brains we have, and the same two arms and two legs everybody has. We’re so trapped that any way we could imagine to escape would be just another part of the trap. Anything we want, we’re trained to want…..All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever get boring.”

Tom just lost his father and is immensely sad. He comes to me in the hope that I will empathize with him and cheer him up.