THE TRIQUETRA OF LIFE: Wisdom, Wealth, and Wellness

A Dark Tech Convergence

The Slot Machine in Your Pocket

Look around a bar, a bus stop, even a church pew — heads bent, thumbs twitching. You’ll see a husband and wife in a restaurant, each glowing at their own phone, or five young friends on a subway bench, silent, clicking screens, each in another world.

Every scroll is a lever pull on a one-armed bandit. Maybe you see a joke. Or you read something that makes you furious. You never know. That’s why you keep swiping for random rewards.

Psychologist B.F. Skinner proved it decades ago with pigeons pecking for food pellets from random reinforcement. Random movements linked to pellet release generated ‘superstitious’ gestures. Now we’re the pigeons. Phones, media feeds, video games — they aren’t built to inform you. They are addictive and bilk you. And like those pecking birds in his lab, most people don’t even notice the cage — or their own delusive, superstitious thinking.

That’s how it spreads: a pigeon flaps and thinks it made food appear … a doomscroller clicks and thinks the next post will reveal meaning … an assassin convinces himself, “If I kill Kirk, then MAGA will fall.” All of it is ritualized delusion fed by random reinforcement.

The New Normal That Isn’t Normal

We sit too long … gaining weight and losing health. We eat processed junk every day. We swallow pills for sleep, for nerves, for arthritis — for everything. We see fewer friends. We live online. The basics that kept earlier generations grounded — foods that nourished, bodies exercised in hiking, neighbors who dropped by for a hug — are now rare.

Add in chemicals Rachel Carson warned about back in the ’1950s — pesticides, plastics, endocrine disruptors that cause falling fertility, frogs mutating genders, and kids struggling with gender identity and shifting moods at unprecedented levels. Enter hormone therapy and drastic surgery for a twelve-year-old whose homeroom teacher insists the confused child’s parents are persecuting him.

This isn’t a paranoid dystopia movie. It’s a lived reality. And the Tyler Robinson case put it all on display.

From Doomscrolling to Detonation

Robinson wasn’t just a video gamer. He was a doomscroller. Bullet casings from the Kirk assassination carried memes from Helldivers 2, “Bella Ciao” antifascist lyrics, and ironic online jokes. His news feeds were full of rage, and his conservative Mormon family noticed a hard political turn to Biden and against Trump.

His transgender roommate said Robinson was “very, very big on gaming.” He grew callous to killing. This one kid, lost in politico-algorithms stirring online anger, fell into the same superstition Skinner saw in birds — believing his gesture would change the world. To him, pulling the trigger was like pulling a lever for a reward. If he killed Kirk, MAGA would collapse. But just like the pigeons, his act was delusion dressed up as destiny.

Why It Matters: The Science Behind the Madness

Here’s where the scholars nod:

• Skinner’s pigeons: Intermittent reinforcement — random rewards — wires the brain for compulsive behavior. The casino is now in your pocket.
• Dopamine hijack: Doomscrolling releases dopamine in anticipation, even when the content itself is toxic. You feel worse, yet keep scrolling.
• Nutritional and chemical stressors: NIH studies show poor diet and micronutrient deficiencies correlate with aggression and depression. Chemicals like atrazine alter hormones in frogs — and potentially in humans, en masse. At the same time, social norms around sex, marriage, and identity have shifted at a speed older generations could barely imagine — leaving society morally disoriented.
• Drug use: A likely factor, though labs can require months to confirm what headlines will hint.
• Isolation: CDC research confirms loneliness magnifies vulnerability to radicalization. Online virtual “communities” can’t replace the embodied. Churches sample it with Bible classes and Sunday services — rituals that mimic community without curing isolation.
• Polarization: Algorithms feed us more of what makes us angry. Anger hardens into identity, into ideology, and into violence. It becomes them or us once the survival instinct kicks in.

The Warning

If we don’t change course, Charlie Kirk will hardly be the last victim. The same cocktail of doomscrolling, junk food, pills, chemical dysphoria, isolation, and enragement is mixed and served daily to millions of fragile minds.

And care to guess who’s allowing this nightmare? We are!

The signs are already here:

• Assassinations: Charlie Kirk murdered mid-speech; Minnesota legislators and their spouses shot earlier this summer. Guns aren’t the problem. Humans are.
• Schools and churches: Two children killed and 17 wounded during Mass at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis. Rifle bullets.
• Transit madness: Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, stabbed to death by a man she never met while riding a Charlotte light rail. No gun this time.
• Abandonments: A newborn baby stuffed in a tote bag and left on a Bronx sidewalk. Not even enough compassion to ring a fire station bell. No gun or knife needed.
• Everyday eruptions: Frequent random stabbings in the U.K. with guns banned. Subway pushings. Brawls at airports. Strangers snapping in grocery store aisles. People defecating in public. Assaults for money or sex. Families living in squalor. National Guard required to restore law and order in big cities.

Some people become zombies wallowing in Times Square or Haight-Ashbury, drugged out, heads down, arms lolling at their sides, rocking in place, rotting quietly. While others — like Tyler Robinson will attack and kill.

That means more assassinations, more random killings, and more senseless, politicized eruptions are not only possible but highly probable. And with each episode, note how concern of others and trust in our fellow man erodes — on a trolley, in a plaza, anywhere a van or knife or rifle can turn ordinary life into a horror show.

“And because of the increase in wickedness, the love of the many will grow cold.” – Matt. 24:12

What Now?

• For Joe Six-Pack: Shut the media off. Get outside into fresh air. Exercise lifting weights, not French Fries. Savor food your grandmother would recognize and love to serve. Talk face-to-face with her.
• For leaders and platforms: Stop hiding behind Section 230. Restrict user-deranged statements, take responsibility for the hate conveyed. Admit the truth about variable, random reinforcement ads — even if it cuts into your big profits. Media: stop airing hate posters in parades and dimwit celebs on stage.
• For all of us: Stop pretending we’ve adapted to the high-tech tsunami. We haven’t — not by a long sniper shot. Like climate change causing floods, chronic societal stress is reaching the extinction level.

If our political leaders won’t fix things, then we must do so before we destroy ourselves in another world war.

Final Word

The extinction bombs aren’t hidden in remote meadow silos.
The launch code is forming in our cell phone passwords.

That deadly code ticks closer every time you or your kids scroll. And unless we act — individually and collectively — we’ll keep manufacturing Tyler Robinsons. And someday, much worse than a bullet will launch from a silo. After you’ve read this, just shut off your device, go out, and take a long walk in a forest. Better yet, bring along a close friend or a child who hasn’t felt serenely alive in a long, long time.