My life has be­come rather in­ter­est­ing of late. I’m the younger em­ployee of an older man who just quit his sta­ble job and is slowly los­ing his mind. I think that’s why he’s started to ex­press ro­man­tic in­ter­est in me, but I don’t re­ally care. It’s nice to be within six feet of an­other hu­man be­ing. I just ended a sev­eral year af­fair with a mar­ried woman af­ter an­other taught me that there’s more to life than my small town and my lov­ing, dys­func­tional fam­ily. I think I’m go­ing to take a road trip with my ge­netic anom­aly of a younger brother. Did I men­tion I’m an ob­ste­tri­cian? I just found out I’m not bi­o­log­i­cally re­lated to the man who raised me.

Before the apoc­a­lypse, I lived in a world where every­one was old and ugly and hated each other. It’s a real place called Haines, Alaska, a town of 2,000 con­spir­acy the­o­rists. Even the most ba­nal top­ics like the li­brary have two sides, di­a­met­ri­cally op­posed, each con­vinced the other has a se­cret plot to gain su­premacy dat­ing back a decade, at least.

On Netflix, every­one is young and beau­ti­ful and only some peo­ple hate each other. How could you not want to be a part of a world like that? A utopia.

My life now re­volves around use of my phone. I don’t be­lieve in charg­ing it at night. It needs sleep just like I do, but I can’t af­ford to have it run out of bat­tery dur­ing the day. My only re­course is to drag it around by its um­bil­i­cal cord, our um­bil­i­cal cord, a 25-ft elec­tric blue ex­ten­sion cord con­nect­ing the charger to the wall. It slith­ers af­ter us as we move from room to room.

My real-world mother, who lives far away, wor­ries I’m lonely, starved for so­cial in­ter­ac­tion. What she does­n’t re­al­ize is that in Netflix Utopia, you are never alone.

I’m on day seven of manda­tory quar­an­tine, but I have an ac­tive so­cial life. Sam Seaborn, Jerry Maguire, Gilbert Grape, Nina Proudman. The list goes on. I flit from one group in­ter­ac­tion to the next, sea­son af­ter sea­son. Sometimes I wish I could have a mo­ment just to my­self in this whirl­wind of a so­cial cal­en­dar, but if I were left alone with my thoughts, I’m not sure we’d get along.

The pro­fun­dity of the Netflix ocean is im­mense, in­fi­nite, all-con­sum­ing, like a land­scape re­flected in a pud­dle. The al­go­rithm only ever rec­om­mends you watch the same 50 movies and TV shows. Of those, you only ever con­sider watch­ing about half. Of those, you’ve al­ready seen an ever grow­ing num­ber. Mathematically, at some point you should run out of ma­te­r­ial to watch, and yet, by steadily low­er­ing your stan­dards, you ap­proach zero, but you never reach it.

And then there are the limbo ti­tles. How many movies make up the de­tri­tus at the bot­tom, the films never asked to the prom, never deemed wor­thy by the al­go­rith­mic gods? If a lost viewer were to trip down the Netflix rab­bit hole and ac­ci­den­tally click on one of these not-meant-for-hu­man-con­sump­tion movies, would there be any­thing to play? Or would the viewer be greeted with an empty screen, a shell, an im­age used to build out the im­pres­sion of a larger space that never ex­isted, like the back­drop of an old Hollywood movie?

In Netflix Utopia, the non-es­sen­tials melt away. You dis­cover the things that can­not be re­duced to vir­tual echoes of their for­mer selves. Virtually noth­ing in this vir­tual utopia.

Today, I took a vir­tual hike in my back­yard, star­ing up at the moun­tains as I did lunges. Real sweat poured down my face. To be ad­mit­ted to Netflix Utopia, I will need to drop the pounds I’ve put on through in­ac­tiv­ity these past few weeks. All the good, im­por­tant peo­ple in Netflix Utopia are skinny. Tom Cruise has abs like Jesus.

In Netflix Utopia, when beau­ti­ful peo­ple say dumb things, it sounds smart. You had me at “hello.” Yippee Ki Yay. And every­one is beau­ti­ful, frozen at the zenith of their ca­reer, af­ter the ve­neers but be­fore age started to soften their jaw­line.

You can learn a lot from these vir­tual friends. How to treat a woman right. How to be a woman be­ing treated right. The in­ter­nal strug­gle be­tween do­ing what is right and what is po­lit­i­cally ex­pe­di­ent that a pres­i­dent faces each and every day of his ca­reer. The times when it’s ap­pro­pri­ate to get drunk, go over to your much younger em­ploy­ee’s house and make out with them. The rare times when it’s not.

In Netflix Utopia, every child re­ceives an iPad at birth. It’s called “machine learn­ing.” Just a few hours of Netflix a day, and any­one can learn how to be a full-fledged mem­ber of the hu­man race. Just a few hours of Netflix a day, and you start to won­der why you ever both­ered liv­ing in the real world.