In “Futurama” there are suicide booths everywhere. Presumably because you can’t die naturally. People get tired and just wear out. What we see here is the same thing, but with slick marketing, which is the problem with legalized suicide. Years ago, a marketing professor came up with a formula that said if you invested X dollars in a marketing campaign, you’d get Y dollars back in profit. To prove it he said, “We’ll sell rocks.” Thus, was born the “Pet Rock.” The profit exactly followed his formulae and they made, IIR, four million dollars.
A suicide kit has been on the market for probably a decade. It’s a plastic bag with a drawstring and an attachment point for a small cylinder of nitrogen. You put the bag over your head, draw the string tight, attach the cylinder and turn the valve. It’s 100% effective in delivering cheap, painless death. Your body’s protection system is a sensor in the lungs keyed to react to carbon dioxide. It can’t sense nitrogen, which is some 70% of the air we breathe.
The only reason for this slick machine is marketing. Next, we’ll be reading about people “just dying” to try out the latest new fad. It’ll be all over TikTok.
Good point
I don’t remember the booths in Futurama. Wonder if the show kept going after I stopped buying the DVDs. LOVED that show.
Yes, I did buy a pet rock. And I DID pet it. No idea where it is now. Might be lost among all the other rocks I picked up along life’s pathway to remember places. Stopped picking up dirt after husband ridiculed me for picking up dirt at the Kentucky Derby track.
Remember sitting with a friend at a Dunkin’ Donuts, who is a fervid advocate of suicide (but hasn’t yet, thank goodness), and hearing her describe buying that device while struggling to maintain a calm exterior so that she wouldn’t stop talking to me about how she was feeling.
Speaking of pet rocks, our beloved pet rock, “Pebbles”, had to be put down last year after developing stage 4 lichens. My wife still cries about sometimes.