It’s a fully-automated system – you want to smile and be happy and so the smile circuit clicks on and that makes you happy. Simple. You want to feel something genuine so you know that you’re not just a soulless mechanism and so the feeling circuit clicks in – job done! You’re feeling just like you want to be feeling. Ergo, you’re not soulless. Ergo, you are a valid human being, swimming comfortably and freely in the turgid soup of your own auto-validatory fantasy.

You want to be happy and so straightaway – well, you know the rest. You know the rest and so do I! It’s a fully automated system – you do the good thing and that makes you good, you do the happy thing and that makes you happy! It’s a fully-automated system my friends and that’s why I’m so keen to tell you about it, that’s why I’m so enthusiastic to be telling you all about it. You can have a great life, you can have a fabulous life, and it’s all fully-automated. You smile because you want to smile, you’re happy because you want to be happy, you have a fabulous life because you signed the binding contract, because you pressed all the right buttons. Everything’s great because you chose to do the right thing.

You want to have a life that anyone would be envious of and so you do. It’s what you want, after all. You read about it in a brochure, you read about it in the promotional literature. You wanted everything to be so great but then it all came back to haunt you and you discovered that you were the livestock of every joke going. You are the talk of the town. You never realised that it was possible to feel so humiliated – no one had ever warned you about it and so now you had to go and learn it the hard way! You learned to your horror that people were gathering in the town square telling jokes about you – it had become a national pastime. Budding stand-up comedians just have to mention your name to get a laugh! They’re an instant hit, their future career is guaranteed. You never realised that it was possible to feel so very bad about who you are. Your ego is attacking itself – it’s a death-dance.

You want to be happy and so you are happy, you want to have a fabulous life and so you sign on the dotted line, you read all the promotional literature. You become the livestock of every joke. Men in suits come to talk to you, they smile at you in that special way of theirs, that special way that they have. The smile that engenders confidence and trust where before there was only cynicism and that broken feeling you know so well. You have the soul of a land-crab, its eye-stalks rising and falling quizzically. There are moments in your private individual consciousness that no one else knows about and which you are afraid to mention. You’ll never mention them, you’ll always stick to the safe topics of conversation. You won’t risk self-disclosure – your so-called ‘friends’ will make mincemeat of you! They’ll torment you beyond the point at which you can endure it and then they’ll pillory you for your freakish, abnormal reaction….

‘Why’s life so hard?’ you ask yourself, ‘why does it have to be so very hard?’ All you ever wanted was to buy into the dream the same as everyone else. Which is your right. Why should you be different to all the others, after all? All you ever wanted was to get a slice of the pie, that pie that everyone is always talking about. The Big Cheesy Pie. They say it’s made of pure Gorgonzola, rich and succulent. Eat too much of that pie and it will make you awful sick, so they say. It will make you very sick indeed. Your stomach will be mewling like a sack of kittens! Your stomach will be mewling piteously. You have the soul of a great white land-crab, trundling along the city streets late at night, raiding all the bins that have been put out for collection. Yours is a lonely existence, lonely and yet at the same time somehow deeply farcical…