On the Peculiar Misery of a Lost Car Key

It takes only a few minutes of fruitless searching for the misplaced car key before I’m prepared to surrender ownership of the car itself, if it means that I could also put an end to this peculiar and cunning brand of tedium. A tyranny worse than an actual tyrant could inflict, this looking. Because consider: where the arbitrary cruelty of a real tyrant allows one to cultivate righteous anger, the lost car key (and the mute, stupid automobile to which it belongs) serves only as a reminder of an unnerving truth — namely, that we are the foremost saboteurs of our own happiness.