The ‘On’ Button. You Can Only Get There from the ‘Off ‘Button.

I’ve been looking through the pinhole.

I know this the way a person knows he’s been drinking too much and too often —like a thing I’ve secretly known for a while and chosen not to examine. The pinhole’s always there, in my pocket, on my nightstand, on the table beside whatever meal I’m only half-present for. It hums with impatient urgency. And of course, I look. How could I not?

What it shows me is tailor-made, not for my best self, but for the self that can be most reliably stimulated. My fears, specifically. My appetite for outrage. That for sure. This isn’t accidental. The pinhole is engineered, and with considerable sophistication, to find the frequency at which I vibrate with the most anxious intensity. It knows how to keep me there because it’s been watching me too. It knows that fear travels faster than safety, that outrage is stickier than satisfaction, and that I’m far more likely to keep looking if what I’m seeing disturbs me. So that’s what it shows me. And of course, I look.

OK. You’ve heard all this before. So have I.

But I’m still looking. And so are you.

Think of that rat in the science lab. The one in the cage with the lever. Press the lever, receive the pellet. Press the lever, receive the pellet. The rat isn’t stupid. The pinhole’s analytics aren’t either. It knows how hungry living things are. It’s designed to be irresistible to any creature with an appetite. Which is to say, any creature at all. I press the lever. The pellet arrives. I tell myself I’ll stop after this one. I don’t.

What’s being fed, I’ve come to understand, isn’t curiosity. Not loneliness either, though that’s closer. It’s something strange, I’m aware of that —but I think of it as a hunger for both emptiness and meaning. A way of digesting nothingness so thoroughly that nothing of substance can get in.

Fear as cortisol-pump. Outrage as oxygen. Anger as eyeball-magnet. And finally, attention as lucre. This is a business model after all. The pinhole’s architects understood early on that once shown threats the human being has very little chance of looking away. And the worldview we’re handed is a dazzling kaleidoscope we keep peering into, checking if that’s really what things look like.

It is, the pinhole assures us. It’s exactly the way things are!

It isn’t, of course. But we’re primed now, activated. And primed and activated people are no good at recognizing anything other than what’s in front of them.

We weren’t built for this. None of us. Not even remotely. We grew to handle the problems we could see and touch and talk through with the small number of people we actually knew. What we’re being handed instead is everything, everywhere, all the time. The bulk of it tuned to the frequency of dread. The volume of raw emotion we’re expected to process in a day—a war, a pogrom, a scandal, an outrage, a counter-outrage, a tragedy, a meme about the tragedy — would have been unimaginable to any prior generation. Forget that — even ten years ago.

And we wonder why we’re anxious. Why politics has become a permanent state of emergency with no memory and no resolution. Why friendships corrode over things seen through pinholes, each former-friend madly clutching their own curated version of reality, utterly certain the other has lost their mind. Why civic life feels like it’s being eaten from the inside. Why ancient prejudices have suddenly come roaring out of their dank caves. (Yes, that very old, very ineradicable one.)

The pinhole didn’t cause all of this. But you can be damn sure it’s making it so much worse.

I was on the subway last week. Without exception, every person on that train was looking down into their pinholes. They wouldn’t be able to tell you anything about who was in that car with them — whether anyone was crying, or laughing, or wearing something strange, or beautiful, or falling asleep against their own reflection in the darkness of subway windows. Make no mistake, pellets were flying out of the pellet machine.

What the riders might have seen on that subway car — the human texture of a city going about its life — was traded for… let’s guess here at the worst of it: a violent act on a random street between strangers they’d never meet, an AI—generated video about a detested politician, a screed from an influencer whose intelligence was as dismal as the floor of the last subway stop.

And when they left the train they would have forgotten everything they’d seen. Or almost. Because an impression will have been made, small perhaps, but long lasting. Think of the hundreds, the thousands of indelible pinhole impressions you carry with you.

In this experiment every other pellet is pure poison.

Here’s the exchange we keep agreeing to: you—lucky pinhole-peerer—get the false sense of possessing the all-knowing eye and we get to manipulate you.

There’s an off button. It’s small and it’s not easy to press, not because it’s hard to find — I know exactly where it is — but because the moment before pressing it feels like deprivation. Like an impending and frightening boredom. Like opting out of the world rather than into one.

But I’ve pressed the button enough times now to know what’s on the other side: The sounds of an actual street. A pair of mallard ducks. An old man, desperately it seems, looking for something or more likely, someone. A little girl riding a tricycle. A cherry tree in the last of its blooming. None of it is special. Except, perhaps, for its being real.

It’s called the off button. But that’s not right. It’s actually the on button. I know this. I just keep forgetting.

Maybe you do too.

Peter Himmelman is a Grammy and Emmy nominated performer, songwriter, film composer, visual artist and award-winning author.