E2: Why Not Me? S13: Kidnapping, Let's Laugh. It's Chemical. Don't Feel Bad. Look at Your Phone.

When I was a gay teenager in the 1980s, people threatened to kill me. Sometimes the threats came through the telephone my mother handed me. Nearly ten years later, even while visiting San Francisco, holding hands with my boyfriend could make strangers yell at us and make the street feel unsafe. Other people saw it happening. They generally remained bystanders.But that’s not the end of the story.What happens when an experience that once seemed enormous is placed beside dangers carried by somebody close to you—dangers involving kidnapping, disappearance, and a surrounding world organized by an entirely different scale of threat? The comparison does not make either experience unreal. It creates an awareness of unequal vulnerability that refuses to provide instructions for what to do next.Why Not Me? follows that awareness into privilege, guilt, self-importance, technology, abstraction, and the peculiar human need to keep thinking after thought has lost any proportionate object of action. Perhaps awareness is not a moral achievement. Perhaps it is chemistry: a pattern-making nervous system searching for somewhere to run, now connected through a phone to every fire, injustice, and unfinished problem on Earth.The episode eventually turns toward the institutions and algorithms that supply the wheel. They were not designed by a single mind, and they did not have to develop exactly as they did. They emerged from countless small choices, measurements, incentives, personalities, and accidents—then began changing the humans who were changing them.Don’t feel bad.Look at your phone.Content note: Contains discussion of homophobic death threats, gun violence, kidnapping, the AIDS crisis, privilege, and public harassment.