Take care, lest ye be crushed by the candy

Editor,

If I were to tell you, dear reader, that you may carry a siren of moral turpitude and a harbinger of impending doom in your pocket, and worse yet, that you engage with its glacé contours as joyfully as you would a beloved novel or film, would you take heed? Or would you laugh me off, confidently, the way you have so many town criers and apocalyptics?

The gravity of the task facing we who know the true nature of the pox looms large in our thoughts, particularly for those of us afflicted. This scourge to which I am referring is none other than the wildly popular Candy Crush Saga.

Before you dismiss my ministrations as preposterous, that such an engaging and pleasurable game could not possibly represent dire societal illness, I will concede your point that from superficial examination, a digital jelly bean hardly seems the monad of ruin.

I posit, however, that our Internet culture, charged with operating the most advanced technologies humanity has ever seen, must remain vigilant against a decay owing to general malaise, else find ourselves at the paddle of a slowly rotting canoe aimed squarely towards a swamp of pollution, sloth and degeneracy.

We must steel ourselves against our orgiastic tendencies! In times of plenty, it may be wise to aid the growth of our society by pruning its most saccharine branches, but to engage, on a massive scale, in the wanton and indiscriminate destruction of food, is beyond foolhardy. Lo, the Saga is but training for the vomitorium!
We must beware duplicitous mercenaries! Lest we ignore Vegetius’ pleas for rigor, consider the following. The same Good Samaritan who offers you his special candy hammer to vanquish your enemy is also a calculating capitalist whose motive is pure profit. Of course it is he who will place an insurmountable obstacle in your path, then arrive forthwith to sell you a solution!

We must apply ourselves to tasks of virtue! Let not the Saga be the balm that soothes your anxieties about the universe. Fiddle not while the world burns! Sublimate your desires into the solution of great problems, not petty riddles. Cease to twiddle your thumbs as the Earth spins round, lest you be remembered as Ozymandias in the sands of aspartame. 

I ask, dear reader, for you to immediately emancipate yourself from this expertly crafted trap. Transcend the sunk cost fallacy and press delete! Now is the time, while this cloying decadence is still sandboxed software, before its toxic ambrosia seeps into the core of our social logic. Don’t feed the candy man! Don’t let him upload you!

Elliot Pearson
Daily Lobo reader