Everything Sucks - A Chronicle of Disappointment

By Hank Fredo

Hank Fredo has seen the world lose its pulse and replace it with Wi-Fi. A writer, professional observer, and reluctant believer in nothing, he drifts through a civilization that confuses convenience with progress and outrage with faith. From shopping-mall chapels to curfew supermarkets, from filtered beauty to algorithmic thought, Hank watches humanity worship at its glowing altars—and takes notes. Everything Sucks isn't prophecy or lament; it's a field report from the age of artificial light, where cynicism becomes the last honest prayer and writing, the only act of survival.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Seagull Editions
• Release date: Oct 14, 2025
• ISBN: 9798232166748

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Copyright © 2025 Seagull Editions.

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. Additionally, the publisher allows for non-profit fan fiction to be produced as long as the original text is clearly cited. ‘Based on EVERYTHING SUCKS by HANK FREDO’ will suffice. For permission requests, please contact the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Unless otherwise indicated, all the names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents in this book are either the product of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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HANK FREDO

EVERY

THING

SUCKS

A Chronicle of Disappointment

Chapter 1: Welcome to the Circus

The rectangles glow like aquarium glass, a soft neon murk where a thousand schools of content drift without purpose. I sit with the remote heavy in my hand like a polite weapon, my thumb moving in small, stupid circles, and the grid keeps replenishing itself. Every tile has a face that looks interested in me, a smile or a furrowed brow or a scream, the whole emotional spectrum packaged into marketable postage stamps. Genres bleed into each other, the way sugar dissolves in cheap tea. Everything looks edible, and everything tastes like nothing.

The top row says, Because You Watched. I never remember watching what it says I watched. Maybe I fell asleep, and the algorithm completed an education on my behalf. The second row is Trending Now, which is a synonym for Do Not Be Left Out. The third row is New Releases, where every new thing has an old face and a familiar cadence, as though novelty has lost the confidence to arrive without a chaperone. A fresh movie promises a bold, original vision, which curiously features the same blue-orange color grading, the same quips, the same swelling synths, the same third act redemption arc that has redeemed more characters than any god in history.

The thumbnails wink at me, but they are not invitations, they are instructions. Here is the show you are already pre-approved to enjoy. Here is the docuseries that will make you feel briefly informed and permanently empty. Here is the prestige drama that will flatter you for caring about people who do not exist. The recommendation engine speaks a language that is neither offer nor question. It is a shepherd dog circling its herd, steering me toward whatever paddock is most efficient. I move right, right, right, and the tiles glide like submissive soldiers.

Somewhere in the grid a section appears: Continue Watching. I have abandoned so many stories that the section looks like a boneyard. Episodes with their bones showing. People paused mid-sentence, mouths open, eyes begging for closure I never gave them. I hover over a detective who had an accent and a drinking problem and a daughter shaped like a guilt trip. He is frozen in the act of discovering something, a clue, a body, a truth about himself. I cannot remember. I scroll away. The detective disappears as though drowned.

The interface has learned the color palette of my weakness. It knows I will not press play on anything that looks like exercise, moral or otherwise. It knows I prefer a measured sadness over ecstatic happiness, since joy has become the sloppy drunk at the party of modern life, loud and untrustworthy. It feeds me shows where the characters perform restrained breakdowns, where the camera lingers on a window full of rain, a hand that does not reach the doorknob in time. It thinks this is depth. It thinks if it bathes me long enough in gray-blue melancholy, I will mistake mood for meaning. Often I do.

The grid keeps reshaping itself, a polite contortionist eager to please. When I pause too long, a tile explodes into a moving preview, sound off, captions barking plot in perfect grammar. The preview is like a very small hostage situation. I did not ask for it, but I cannot look away without admitting defeat. Handsome men, handsome women, a city skyline, a body, a kiss, a betrayal, the suggestion of consequence. All of it rendered with the emotional precision of airport art. The captions assure me that a character is grieving. The actor’s face assures me the same. The music, even on mute, thrums its assurance. I am surrounded by assurances. I feel nothing but the minor ache of being managed.

There was a time when browsing meant something like wandering. You went to a video store with carpets that smelled like dust and sugar, and the clerk with the hair and the opinion would hand you something with a cracked case and say, trust me. Sometimes you regretted it. Sometimes you fell in love with a movie that loved you back in its clumsy way. Now browsing is a guided tour with no guide, a museum that moves the paintings for you to match your pace, a buffet where a helpful hand keeps your plate inside invisible lines. I am a free citizen of a frictionless empire. I have never felt so supervised.

I think about how these systems are trained on us, how the machine knows that I paused once at a scene of soft snowfall and therefore I must foam for winter. It learns that I watched two documentaries about minor poets and assumes I want a third, preferably an algorithmic elegy narrated by an actor known for playing a detective with a daughter. It has no curiosity, only appetite. It is profit shaped into preference and piped back to me as a kindness. The whole apparatus whispers, let me narrow your future.

I scroll past a stand-up special where the comedian declares that the world is crazy now, which is the kind of sentence that arrives fully embalmed. I scroll past a reality show in which beautiful people learn empathy in twelve episodes and a reunion. I scroll past a period drama where the corsets squeak with propriety and the dialogue is a modern therapist trapped in antique clothes. I scroll past a documentary about a fraud who believed in nothing and sold everything, the genre that has replaced fables for adults who need their morals notarized.

My thumb moves without me. I am a tired king presiding over a court of jesters who all tell the same joke, and my subjects are my symptoms. I could turn it off, I could read a book, I could walk outside and salute the moon, but the grid strokes some ancient nerve. It promises company without conversation, time without consequence. I am not entertained, but I am pacified. The machine does not need my pleasure; it needs my consent.

A thought arrives with the neatness of a headline. Entertainment has stopped pretending to be art and has become a mirror that flatters the audience’s emptiness. We stare into it and see our curated fatigue, our righteous boredom, our demand to be fed without chewing. The mirror never tells us we are ugly. It tells us we are us, which is worse.

I imagine an executive saying, people want simplicity. I imagine a boardroom applauding. Simplicity ends where condescension begins, and our age has made them synonyms. Everything is smooth now. The corners of experience have been sanded down so no one can hurt themselves on an idea. Stories bend themselves around our laziness and call it accessibility. If a character risks becoming difficult, the plot coughs politely and changes the subject. We