text: It started as a gimmick, a quick fix for a depressed generation hooked on television, social media, low vitamin d levels and zero socialising skills. The gimmick was hopium, the viagra of a lost generation feeling blue. A drug that lifted you up and balanced your moods released the right amount of chemicals into the brain to alleviate the darkness. We had seen others before it, like Xanax. Still, hopium was marketed, it was FDA approved instantly, and it appeared at a time in life when despair, depression and the darkness were second nature in civilisation. A black swan of the drug world or a white swan, depending on how you look at it. Pop up ads with rainbows, bright colours and sunlight backdrops would appear on the news feeds if you scrolled social media, and everybody did back then; you would see oddly hypnotic, almost childlike ads of the so-called harmless pill that took away the fear, the lack of purpose you might be experiencing "don't worry hopiums got you". Overweight and binge eating, "don't worry, hopiums got you". Home alone with no job can't get laid. "Don't worry, hopiums got you!'" It was like a blink in time before it was everywhere and in everyone; none of us knew how malleable we were and how easy we had become. Sheep following the herd without question. Like dominoes confirming our bias with hit after hit continuing to take the elixir of fake happiness. We bent over; we never questioned who was behind it or what the hell it was? We just wanted out; we wanted something to believe in. There were rumours, of course, threads quickly being taken down, and authors demonised being called non-believers. Anyone anti hopium was considered ill or deranged to speak up against happiness itself. Hopium came into the world like a storm that you saw on the horizon, and before you knew it, you were swept up in a torrential downpour of hysteria. At first, the hysteria of happiness. The energy around those first few years was like a trance state of delusional psychosis. People were so happy, or were they hurtling toward complexity itself? I still felt despair; I still felt pain. I cried. I was sad at times; I never told anyone I couldn't, or I would be locked up and taken to hopium centres for the non-believers. I believe the gift I had was that the drug didn't get through to me; I was still human, and I wanted answers. Am I alone in this? Are there others like me? It's been years now, alone, the inner workings of my mind trying to concoct a plan to wake everyone up secretly. I had done some digging and found out the corporation behind the project was funded by a mysterious billionaire who shied away from the public eye. What was the end game here? It all sounds, so cliche to think that one bored billionaire could be behind a world changing event a once in a lifetime switch in human thought patterns in an entire civilisation's mood change.