You realize that the irritating hunch that things are basically wrong, that life is something that should not have been, was correct all along. You really have been a stranger in a strange land.

This life of shit—whose strongest flavor is alienated labor and the stress of low wages making a thin safety buffer (bank account) and real survival anxiety. And to think that this way of life is engineered. How’s that for a psychological thriller for you? Worse than an invasive zombie apocalypse—where the monster is other and interesting to look at, like a mongoose or piranha—the current one is just a slow interior morph.