Page 61 - Like No Business I Know

Beige

flow of time? It has stretched out while we watch it pass as on a
conveyor belt, the meaningless and repetitious days becoming years
and decades as our well-preserved bodies slowly age before our eyes
in mirrors and photographs. And aging has no pay-off in
contemporary society: everyone wants to be young; billions are spent
in a futile quest to find the fountain of youth, and the experience of
the old has no value in a rapidly-changing technological social matrix.
Life after death may have some significance to the minority of true
believers amongst us, but most of the urban middle class has been
disenchanted: whatever lip service they pay to theology, few behave
as if they cannot wait to receive their heavenly reward!”
“Thus we have the creation of a condition unique to our era:
having bought time to kill, we find it killing us. Is it a vague malaise
or a true medical complaint, worthy of intervention by psychiatrists
armed with the latest tranquilizers and mood elevators? Sid and the
professor between them couldn’t decide, and neither the government
nor the pharmaceutical industry has deemed it necessary or profitable
to declare the problem a national health issue. But our founder, with
the persistence he has since amply demonstrated in the successful
establishment of Beige, wanted to know more. He was in a healing
profession—but not for his health! Like you, he was ready to supply
a perceived need with the means of its satisfaction for the benefit of
all parties.”
“Sid’s next move was to consult informally with the medical
professionals with whom he came in contact through his work. That
included both orthodox doctors and practitioners of alternative
medicine. Everyone had a different solution for what Sid called TD,
temporal dysphoria, based on their particular philosophy of
treatment. None of them seemed satisfactory to Sid—if they worked,
why did the problem persist? He came to realize that treatments for
all disease fall into two categories: allopathic and homeopathic. You
can see on this graphic that quite a few unofficial allopathic remedies
for TD already exist. Allopathy seeks a cure by inducing results
opposite from those produced by the malady. I should say at this
point that TD can in fact only be definitively removed from a
person’s life through real behavioral and cognitive changes:
meaningful work, productive interaction with other people, small but
incremental improvements in the immediate environment. But, as in

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