The Territorial

If you’ve read anything written by an AI lately, or half the modern fiction online, you’ve probably encountered Recirculation Existential Dread, or as I like to call it, R.E.D. It’s that faint whiff of melancholy that floats through every supposedly “deep” story, like recycled air from a vent not cleaned since the Nixon administration.

R.E.D. starts innocently enough. Someone asks an AI to write something meaningful.

The machine obliges by handing you a scene where a lonely man stares at his reflection in a microwave door while pondering the futility of breakfast. Before you know it, he’s comparing his burnt toast to the fragile impermanence of life.

It’s not that the sentiment’s wrong; life is fleeting after all, it’s just that we’ve all read it before. It’s the same cup of cold coffee poured into a different mug, and like stale coffee, R.E.D. doesn’t wake you up so much as make you question why you got out of bed in the first place.

Writers once worried about clichés like “it was a dark and stormy night.” Now we’ve upgraded to, “She looked out the window and realized the void was looking back.”

The void must be exhausted. It’s been on duty since 1957, clocking overtime in every short story about finding oneself at a bus stop in the rain.

AI, of course, adores R.E.D. It learned from the best, thousands of human writers who decided that depth equals dread.

The machine can’t help it. If you say, “Make this thoughtful,” it dusts off the same line, “He wondered if anything truly mattered.”

Congratulations, you’ve just triggered another outbreak of R.E.D.

Humans aren’t immune either. We catch it from each other through literature, social media, and indie films where no one smiles for two hours. It spreads fastest in coffee shops, late-night dorm rooms, and anywhere the Wi-Fi signal is weak enough to encourage introspection.

But here’s the funny part, even R.E.D. has a purpose. Like mold in blue cheese, it adds flavor when used sparingly.

A touch of existential dread can make a story honest, even profound. The trick is not to let the words marinate in it.

So maybe the cure isn’t to avoid R.E.D., but to laugh at it. To recognize that yes, the universe is vast and our lives are brief, but we can still enjoy a good sandwich, pet the dog, and change the air filter once in a while.

After all, if everything is meaningless, then so is meaninglessness, which makes the whole thing sort of even. And that, my friend, is how you take the dread out of existence and put the circulation back into your lungs.