It helped keep the madness at bay, her inventing. She had total control over every aspect. It was very cliche for the inventor to be mad and she knew it; but she supposed her madness was more pedestrian. Madness is an outdated term anyway. Still, you couldn’t help it once social media became the norm. There was too much, always too much. Some people used their voices for good but most people were just exhausting. At least the inventing helped her create instead of the whine whine whine online. She’d rather listen to the whine of machines. Both were bad for her tinnitus.
This one was a mess, but they were often a mess. Materials were easy enough to come by. Sense and reason were not. Creativity was now valued for how it added to the shiny, sleek aesthetic of the future, not for the nuts and bolts of the past. If your brain didn’t think in smooth, white lines, you had no place. It was strange how the cleaner the physical world grew to be, the messier the online world became. But no one thought of it as messy. It had been normal for so long, the increase in negativity was hardly noticed by most.
The invention might have been a manifestation of madness, rather than a coping mechanism in the literal sense. Everyone else sat in their shiny homes and complained, while she dug through dumps and screwed pieces together. She was probably the foolish one.