The Drama Machine

Everyone’s so goddamn dramatic.
But can you blame them?

It’s what we’ve been taught.
Not in school.
In screens.

Our parents worked.
Two jobs, each.
Just to keep the lights on, the fridge cold, the bills barely behind.
To get my brother his meds.
To get me to theater camp.
To keep the house from breaking under the weight of its own good intentions.

So what did they do?

They sat us in front of the TV.
Let it babysit us with gunshots and laugh tracks.
Let it sing us lullabies written by executives.

Yesterday it was a desktop.
Today it’s an iPad.
Tomorrow it’ll be plugged directly into the part of your brain that still remembers what the sky looked like before notifications.

We weren’t just raised on content.
We were formed by it.

We watched sitcom fights, reality show meltdowns, 5-minute villain arcs and 30-second redemptions.
Everything dialed to eleven.
Everything trimmed for maximum engagement.
Everything pretending to be real.
None of it ever was.

And now?

Coldplay tickets sell out and it's a tragedy.
Someone doesn’t text back and it’s a betrayal.
A job rejection is a death sentence.

We catastrophize not because we’re weak,
but because we’ve been programmed to write story beats instead of living lives.

Our brains?
They don’t see reality.
They see episodes.
They search for structure — three acts and a breakdown —
because that’s what we were raised on.

And here’s the cost:

We don’t know how to sit with discomfort.
So we dramatize it.
We don’t know how to express fear.
So we escalate it.
We don’t know how to feel sadness.
So we repackage it as a trauma narrative with a Spotify playlist.

Drama becomes trauma.
And then trauma becomes baseline.

And now we can’t even do our fucking homework without spiraling.
Can’t answer emails without existential dread.
Can’t make dinner without picturing five different worst-case scenarios
because somewhere inside, we’re still writing the scene.

Always scanning the horizon.
Not for hope.
Not for joy.
Not even for lions.

Just for the next thing to break us.

And we never got past that part of the episode.