The optimist runs away from what was; the pessimist runs away from what will be; and both run away from what is.

To appreciate a good apocalypse you need a front-row seat. The last thing you want is someone's silly head blocking the view. That's how my friend Phil explained his insistence on buying tickets for the nuclear fireworks festival a full year in advance. And he would settle for nothing less than splurging on the Fissionale–the most impressive night of the event.

Where does the entertainer exist? Only in the minds of those who give him attention. Without attention — from fans, or a captive audience, or just bored people — the entertainer is nothing more than a potential that has no path to realization. Any random face in the audience is actually far more powerful than the personality that stands on the stage and appears to be in control of things. Each such face can simply turn in another direction, and by doing so, deprive the entertainer of a piece of his fictitious power. But the established rules of entertainment teach the members of the audience to see themselves as helpless victims of charisma, and this way, also train them for a life of submissiveness and humiliation in other areas where it is in practice they who hold all the cards.

When the Devil's workday ends, he crashes on the couch and starts channel surfing. Somewhat narcissistically, he enjoys only channels that display the results of his own evil efforts. He watches the news, of course. He also spends time watching violent films, brain-killing commercials, and IQ-imploding talk shows. But to him, those are more similar to work than to true fun. What he really likes—with his heart and not just his brain—is seeing examples of resignation: people who accept their awful fate with a shrug, maybe even a smile. Those who not only think, quite reasonably, that the world is bad—but have also given up their right to protest against that state of affairs. Those who don't realize that a protest, however futile, is the only thing that causes the Devil to doubt his own talent and self-worth, sometimes to the extent of making him consider early retirement. Always unsure whether he is skillful enough to make his victims love him, he never goes to sleep before coming across such a person on screen. Only then does he turn off the TV with a smile and calls it a day; and his sleep is a sweet one indeed, completely dreamless, with all the nightmares now happening exclusively outside his head.

You can be serious about your search for meaning even if you don't believe that meaning actually exists. The only requirement is that you hate meaninglessness enough to spite it on a professional basis.

The atmosphere of techno-narcissistic culture resembles a horror movie in which the horror is entirely created by the characters' increasingly desperate insistence on believing, contrary to everything they see and feel, that they are actually in a comedy with a happy ending.