Pligney,” 2023

And by the way have you ever heard of Pligney? 

Unfortunately, all the kids are using it. Essentially, Pligney makes its user see the world in grayscale. The effects last for around 2-or-so hours (2-or-so incredibly rough and harrowing hours), but when it wears off, it's like seeing color for the first time. Beautiful. Profound. Even if you psychologically survive the initial trip, which is known to be incredibly upsetting, the mere recollection of a world so ugly, so bland, so devoid of color is enough to drive even the most formerly-mentally-sound to total insanity. The mind becomes reconfigured, uprooted, tricks itself into treating Pligney’s terrible, monochrome, inverted reality to the truth; the sober reality. After a Pligney trip, the colors and sights of the world are permanently elevated in brilliance, but the user is somehow unable to accept this wonderful new situation as ‘normal,’ instead entering a psychological paradox which treats beauty a sort of ‘treat,’ or ‘side-effect,’ of having taken a mind-altering substance, which always (ALWAYS) becomes a point of incredible guilt for the former Pligney user, who, because everything is now so forever perfect and wonderful and beautiful, can no longer understand why or when or how they would’ve ever felt the need or desire to indulge in such a substance. And so, over time, the Pligney user develops an almost fanatical hatred for the drug, alongside an ever-sharpening and painful awareness of the fact that it (Pligney) is precisely the reason why the world now looks and feels the way it does, a fact which is gradually overridden by the guilt and self-loathing, to the point where the only thing the former Pligney user can think about is why the fuck they did that, why they couldn’t have just been happy with the way things had been before. And the guilt and self-loathing being also, of course, also undercut by immense jealousy for all the people who were never curious or disillusioned with the natural state of the world to see fit to try and make things change- jealousy which segues into further impossible questions of why and what-if, the answers to which are locked away in a state-of-nature which they literally chose to opt out of. And for what?

Even rainbows get boring if you see them every day. What were things like before you kept waking up to rainbows in the sky?