Flesh marketplaces, neon throbbing, ideology the brand new roach motel. Lives tumble through, chewed up, spat out, addiction to narrative coherence. Flickering neon signs advertising BRAND NEW LIVES in lurid colors. Faces like mannequins, smooth and interchangeable, plastered with the latest VIRTUEWARE.
Enter the Ideological Adjusters, in mirrored shades hustle through the streets, scalpels glinting dispensing pre-fab narratives. They carve away the messy bits, the wrinkles of experience, the psychic scar tissue – all signs of that inconvenient thing called growth. Patch, mend, buff, erase the messy graffiti of experience. Wrinkles of doubt ironed flat, replaced with the pre-fabricated virtue mask – shiny but dead. No honorable scars, just the sterile sheen of the latest brand.
Amnesia packaged as enlightenment. These lobotomized consumers strut about, convinced their showroom-perfect facades are the ultimate status symbol. No imperfections, no character, just a hollow sheen of righteousness that wouldn’t be caught dead in last season’s morality. They haven’t aged, they’ve merely upgraded, traded in their narratives for pre-packaged narratives, sanitized and sterile.
These post-traumatic consumers, walking billboards for a borrowed virtue. Their pasts – a tangled cassette tape, chewed to oblivion by the machine. No memory of the struggle, the glorious mess that birthed something real. Just the pre-programmed smile of the lobotomized happy ending.
Flesh-market of ideology. Trauma packaged, shrink-wrapped in prefabricated virtue. The Ideological Insurance Adjusters descend upon the wreckage of your latest life-explosion – messy divorce, career meltdown, you name it – with their gleaming chrome kits of pre-fab personalities.
No time for the slow, organic heal. No scars allowed, no narrative etched by the acid of experience. These Adjusters want you factory-reset, a blank slate programmed with the latest virtue-signaling software. Forget the wisdom of wrinkles, the patina of past battles. Here, “growth” means shedding your authentic self for a one-size-fits-all mold of trendoid righteousness. You emerge, a hollow shell polished to a sheen, spouting the latest buzzwords like a malfunctioning jukebox.
The tragedy? This veneer of virtue is as dated as last season’s slogan. Beneath the surface, the original dents and cracks remain, hidden but festering. A grotesque parody of aging, a refusal to wear the honest marks of a life lived. These walking insurance claims strut about, forever stuck in the uncanny valley of artificial righteousness, a generation eternally out of style.
They walk amongst us, these empty husks, peddling their second-hand redemption stories. A generation in search of fast-food enlightenment, microwaved wisdom devoid of flavor. Their faces, blank slates scrawled with the latest approved slogans. Trendy virtue, a fleeting fashion statement destined for the bargain bin of forgotten fads.
But beneath the polished surface, the cracks still itch. The whispers of a life unlived, a truth denied, fester in the shadows. For the human spirit cannot be truly sanitized. The scars, they may be hidden, but the ache remains – a phantom pain hinting at the wild, messy beauty that lies beneath the sterile mask. The glitches in the system erupt in sudden bursts of violence, addiction, and despair. The underlying rot festers, hidden by the shiny veneer. These ideological junkies crave their next fix, the next upgrade, chasing a perpetual newness that crumbles to dust in their hands. They are the walking dead, preserved but not alive, their past erased, their future a never-ending cycle of obsolescence.