Here’s the thing about content: there’s too much of it and most of it is absolute dogshit. You log online and spend two hours trying to find the least dogshit option, only to succumb to a brain-splitting headache, induced by the sheer terror of an overabundance of choice. To avoid this, we introduce Words to Live By. Let Eleanor take you on a media journey: she decides the curriculum, so you don’t have to.

WEEK ONE

You’re Not Alone

Reading Assignment: The National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms

Familiarize yourself with your surroundings. Pay attention to the granular details, like the differences between an edible mushroom and its potentially lethal lookalike. Evaluate your position in the ecosystem and contemplate your insignificance. Try to persuade yourself that there is no creator and that what you are seeing is merely a convenient accident. If, after some time, you remain unconvinced, pretend you are the creator and mentally decorate the terrain as you see fit. Are you emboldened by the responsibility or do you bow?

WEEK TWO

Eat Your Heart Out (And Save the Rest for Slop)

Reading Assignment: Cormac McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses

Learn how to become an alpha and assume your position as pack leader. Consider humanity’s propensity to create stories and weigh whether this might serve some arcane evolutionary role. Defeat this function by momentarily acquiescing to this function. Cry, if you must, but as soon as your tears dry, pick yourself up off the floor. Prolonged bouts of sentimentality are futile and unseemly. Relegate heartache and pain to your brain’s animalistic and inaccessible interior.

WEEK THREE

Go to War With Your Perceived Self-Importance

Reading Assignment: Nico Walker’s Cherry

Acknowledge that even though you are an alpha, you are not special and you will never be special. Tell yourself, “I am not special.” Look at your hands. Hold them up to the sun. Appreciate them for their prehensile capabilities. Remember that your hands are only utensils; they can caress just as easily as they can erase. Commit this mantra to memory: There are no happy endings. And do not forget: you are not special and the United States Government (USG) does not give a shit about you and certainly not anyone else (not even their own progeny). As an absolute imperative: refuse to watch Apple’s MKULTRA-adjacent adaptation of this woebegone book.

WEEK FOUR

Astral Project to Another Dimension That’s Actually Just This Dimension

Reading Assignment: Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo

Now that you know that you’re not special and that USG (our eminent multinational corporatocracy) doesn’t give a shit about you beyond your ability to accumulate, find recompense in the realization that we are all not special, together. Begin to question if anything below the surface ever changes. Tap into your pituitary gland and dance with the Mind-at-Large. Interrogate the forces that compel you to feel special and challenge their motives.

WEEK FIVE

No One Is Coming to Your Funeral and That’s Okay

Reading Assignment: Valdimir Nabokov’s The Eye

What if you never existed? What if you watched yourself live and breed and die only to discover that the spirit you call Me was just an extraordinarily cogent hallucination? Now that you know you’re not special and that, in fact, you’re completely replicable: Test your newfound resolve.