My fear becomes more apparent in a pharmacy

My fear becomes more apparent in a pharmacy. I wade down the aisles entranced. 

And even though it’s a fact that the aisles in big franchise pharmacies are not as long as those in supermarkets, there’s a greater sense of urgency, something you don’t get when you’re shopping for food or cleaning agents, that you definitely get when you look at packaged vitamins and health supplements. You suddenly need a lot of them, or something that’s in most of them at any rate.

I have taken to looking up the smallest additive on the internet in case it’s toxic to any of my conditions. And really, it took me years of research to realise that I have no health concern that could ever be helped or hindered by anything you may find in a packaged bottle of vitamins. I realised I could take them all and absolutely nothing would happen. 

That’s when I started to think that my problem was that I wasn’t drinking enough tea. Black tea, white tea, red tea or green tea. I even found Egyptian blue lotus tea which is supposed to have a psychoactive substance that causes euphoria, and I felt no happiness at all. 

All of it is available at big pharmacies, and all of it comes with a disclaimer that there can be no guarantee that any of it works. Meanwhile,

I felt as emotionally empty as my pockets while my kitchen and bathroom cabinets got fuller.

Philosophically, and sociologically, I began to wonder whether humans are the only creatures that hoard edible substances with the hope of a better tomorrow. I asked around until I was told that bees are the worst hoarders on earth. And magpies, squirrels, beavers and ants store things away for future use, that also includes waiting to trade stuff for sex.

That’s all I needed to know. That’s life in a nutshell. We create the solution before we’ve even created the problem. - Fringe