The year is 2084. You’re playing a game of four-dimensional basketball,
and one of your teammates makes a backhanded insult about your
free throw skills. Immediately, a few things happen in your mind.
1. You feel pain.
2. You have the urge to reach through your virtual reality brain implant
and make the guy regret his smug little comment.
3. Your self-esteem spends the next few days/weeks in a tailspin, causing you to ruminate over the insult, imagine and reimagine how you wish you
had responded, and suffer.
But in the midst of this process, you think to yourself, “Wait a minute
- it’s 2084. We have technology for this."
So you open up an application through your neural interface that
allows you to quickly modify your own brain. You sit through a few mind advertisements, try not to think any thoughts the government wouldn’t like, and
then you’re in.
With just a few brain clicks, you are able to tell the software to remove
your tendencies to suffer, seek revenge, and ruminate when someone insults
you. You even add a feature that allows you to actually feel joy when you are
insulted and to quickly respond with a witty and good-natured retort. Your
new automatic response allows you to diffuse hostile situations and look like a
rockstar, instantly making that awful sting of an insult a thing of the past.