“It's strange, living here,” Sardjen said. “I feel so jaded, like a really depressing sort of jaded, and it took me forever to figure it out. But I think I've got it.

The ceiling fan spun.

“Advertisement. Bit by bit, it tears us apart – to see the people on the billboards, the back of the pizza oven's box, how they're so perfectly content and joyous in their life, neatly ordered and harmonious with all those around them, their wide smiles and starched shirts, and here we are standing on the outside looking in, so desperate to have that sort of stability in our lives, like we're always on the umbilical cord, but the products never bring that – but it's the choice you have to make, to either consume irrationally, in the hopes that someday you'll be able to smile like that too, or you have to shut them out, to hate them, like a perfect stranger who's nice enough to smile at you and shake your hand, but you turn them down – how can you do that? It's like disavowing your essential humanity, to take all the things you want to be, the happiness you want to feel in the world, and kinda crumple it up into a ball and leave it there, to abandon all the hopes you ever had. What kind of a choice is that?”