A Meal in a Pill

By John Beuhler

All their sins were absolved the day THEY cured hunger. It tasted better than food, cost pennies, and acted immediately.

Life changed quickly. Work productivity soared with no energy dips after lunch, then no lunch. No one was late grabbing breakfast or early leaving for dinner.

With no need for food, downtime needn’t be spent at the grocery store, cooking, washing up, or even talking about food. There was even a pill for dogs who gained exclusive access to the cool toilet bowl water, as the need for elimination had been eliminated.

The tests were as positive as they were exhaustive. The pill was safe and nourished completely. It even restored strength to the starving and slimmed the obese.

The civil infrastructure lost weight too as farms and their land were returned to nature. Coffee shops, grocery stores, candy shops and restaurants circled their wagons in the city’s new “food districts” that were most patronized by the elderly. Their denial of progress would take care of itself eventually.

The first years were exciting. It was like dropping a large weight, so we could launch into the future. With this mammalian responsibility to find sustenance removed, we felt light, but that feeling also felt cheap like pine furniture.

The pill was so affordable that men didn’t need to work to support their families and women didn’t need to cook to nourish them. With all the free time, families could spend more quality time together—but doing what? Mostly searching for new ways that they could be relevant to each other.

Failing family, we dove into ourselves. The main activity became picking up a new hobby and then putting it down with the same effete momentum. Cooking was fun, but now extremely expensive, and mostly for hipsters.

We all knew something was wrong, we denied it. After all, we were the elbow generation. We started in one direction, but we were off in an exciting new one. Maybe we just needed to buck up and suffer our growing pains.

It took several more years before it was undeniable. We could no longer turn a blind eye to the rash of suicides. The spike of self-inflicted deaths would become the new baseline before spiking to a new plateau. This happened as regularly as the tides would litter our beaches with uncaught fish.

After public outcry, THEY delivered another spate of tests; the science was sound. No psychological effects came from the pill. It was perfect. However, even with their endless resources, THEY couldn’t test the pill’s effect on our souls.

The soul isn’t something you can see or touch; it is our relationship to others. That’s how it can live on after you die. Not as a translucent specter, but in the minds and hearts of those you’ve known.

Our soul is our life story written by our relationships.

A life remembered for good is admitted to heaven and the opposite is true. Heaven and hell are not real places, but analogies based on others’ opinions of the deceased. Our soul doesn’t exist by itself. That is why solitary confinement is considered cruel, and a job without human connection is commonly called soul-destroying.

The Pill removed many rituals that support social connections, including love, which is the strongest connection. When you degrade the ability to give and receive love the soul starves. The body doesn’t die from spiritual starvation, but often by their own hand.

The pill liberated us from the annoying work of being human, but when you remove the work of being human, being human no longer works.

The next generation hadn’t ever eaten real food, so there wasn’t anyone interested in restarting its production, as they didn’t even miss it. They took their ever-present sadness as a fact of life—because it was. Fewer and fewer children were born and those left alone and bored succumbed to the quiet suicide of drugs and alcohol.

An entire civilization dried up and blew away on the winds of convenience. The doomed progeny of those who exalted progressiveness even if it meant progressing to their oblivion.

This isn’t a true story, and there is no meal in a pill. However, there is something much worse.

The internet has also fundamentally changed what it means to be human. It has displaced every industry, either directly or indirectly, and without knowing what effect it would have, we fed it our social lives and as a result our souls are dying.

The internet is a powerful and useful utility just like how the Pill was healthy and convenient. If it was poison, we would have stopped taking it, but instead, we let it displace something that we didn’t know we needed and starved us like how the internet is doing now.

With man’s need for romantic connection satisfied by pornography and women’s need for attention sublimated by photo and video sharing sites, the need of men and women for each other is weakening. Even dating apps that provide a false sense of inexhaustible options and therefore no urgency have cheapened face to face courtship.

The Internet has synthesized its own brand of romance and displaced the kind that has human value. Coupling is now seen as an optional lifestyle choice rather than the essential thrust of human existence.

With its addictive hooks set deep, the internet has psychologically ravaged women who now see themselves as sexual products in a digital meat market. A virtual world where they must now compete with celebrities and pornography by emulating it and therefore diminishing their reputations and therefore souls. 

Social media has also pathologized friendship. It encourages us to collect people and quantify our social value by their number. Then, by design, it positions us in social competition with these acquaintances.

With sanctimony a popular form of competition, we now exist as a network of spies hoping to catch each other stepping outside of the internet’s ever-constricting moral boundaries. Anxiety has soared and our eyes have crossed from watching ourselves as closely as we watch our “friends.”

Trying to reconcile our real thoughts from our Internet-approved ones creates painful cognitive dissonance, and that married with feelings of inferiority and isolation is creating an epidemic of depression which is the feeling of the soul dying.

Will we realize that our health isn’t only held in the body? That the intangible soul is what makes life worthwhile? That our connection to others defines us? That we need to re-establish channels of flesh and blood interaction that reinforce relationships and love? That you can’t fix someone’s dying soul with medication? Will these social fundamentals fall between the cracks of generations? Will THEY do anything to stop what they’ve wrought.

Is it too late? I hope not.

Deactivate, delete, sign out and spit the pill.