I just went back to the movie theater this past Monday for the first time in a year. If I said that sentence to 27-year-old Bitter Ben, he would have two questions for me. Did movie theaters become extinct? The second question would be, “Are you dead?”

When I was in my 20’s I went to movies all the time. I would go almost every weekend, I read Entertainment Weekly and checked the box office reports every week, and I knew the all the actors, actresses and even the stuntmen for every movie that came out or was coming out.

A combination of things led to my year-long streak of not seeing movies in the theater, but even four years ago, I couldn’t have imagined going an entire year without seeing a movie in a theater. Even during the dry years of Covid, I didn’t have a streak of an entire year.

Before the movie started, my favorite part of going to the theater displayed itself on the screen. The coming attractions. The trailers. A trailer can make any movie look good, no matter how bad it is. In fact, I’m still a huge fan of some trailers of movies that I’ve never seen, or movies that I hated.

One of the trailers I saw this time was for Inside Out 2, a sequel to a movie unimaginably called Inside Out. The people that made Inside Out must have been wired into my brain pan at the time, because when it came out, it happened precisely when my daughter was 11 years old, and we had just moved to a new city, and she had several thoughts about it. Riley was a fictional, animated facsimile of my daughter at the time. I thought it was very rude of them to spy on me and my family and make a “fictional” story of her life and also to not compensate us for the rights to it.

Now I knew all about the five swirling emotions running around in my daughter’s head and how her core memories of her dad were being sledgehammered into oblivion.

It was the first time that I realized that her brain didn’t have independent thoughts. She was almost 100% being controlled by those emoji’s inside her head. Then I realized that I also didn’t have control over my thoughts either. I realized that we are just emotionally programmed computers. You scoff, and that’s okay, because you’ve been programmed to scoff, you little scoffers. It’s just like I was programmed to write this post. Sorry, I didn’t have a choice.

I understand you scoff, because you are really smart and you were taught that brains have these endless capacities. This intelligence, and wisdom that can do so many things that it is almost unlimited. But are they really unlimited? Or just limited by what that brain can see, hear, touch, taste and feel. From all the different inputs and ideas coming from multiple sources. In other words, from their programming.

Every thought you have comes from somewhere, right? Some come from your parents, or your siblings. Some come from teachers, pastors, friends or the news. Websites, books, internet or social media. You might think that you are thinking original thoughts all the time, but you’re not. It may be the first time in history that a thing and another thing were combined. But they all came from somewhere. You could remix the lyrics of a song and add some guitar instead of a harp, but those are both things that existed. And where did you get the notes for that song? All music is made up from a scale of notes already invented.

All books are based on something before, using words and letters that someone else came up with. Even Adam and Eve didn’t come up with original thoughts. They got them from God and the snake.

Jim Rohn, a motivational speaker, said that we are generally the average of the five people that we spend the most time with. In my case, I tend to pick up the language and ideas, and talking points of the people I spend the most time with. (Programming) The most bizarre programming I get from my fellow programmers is the ability to pick up the laugh of people around me. I’ve had dozens of different laughs in my life, and they’ve all been adapted from people around me. I’m just good at imitating them. It’s not a talent, it’s just good programming.

Think about it this way. How are computers programmed? In their infancy, computers were just a way of translating 1’s and 0’s. Then, over time, people figured out that they could put their thoughts and ideas into a computer by manipulating the 1’s and 0’s to do certain things. Make pictures, write words, automate those 1’s and 0’s to do more things and on their own, so that with simple inputs, people could make them do a lot of things faster, easier and more efficiently.

People are just made of cells. Their version of 1’s and 0’s. On the core levels, we tell those cells to divide and do things faster, easier and more efficiently and just like computers, we found out we could be programmed to do amazing things. We had to learn how to do them (like computers) but once we did, we found out we could repeat those things.

Just like computers, we have bugs that need to be fixed. Just like computers, we get older and someday become obsolete. Just like computers, we can transfer our hard drives to another computer, first with a cord, humans with an ambilocal one, computers with a USB. Then we both started to learn that we could do it wirelessly, (humans with our mouths and other senses).

We have our hard drives, that store the information that we need, and we get rid of info that we don’t need. The stuff we need now, we keep in our short-term memories, and the stuff we will need later, in the long term. We try to delete the corrupted stuff, but somehow those seem to always be around.

Some people use their programming to play games, some use their programming to work. Some use their programming to build and create, others use their programming to tear down and destroy. We all have certain programming whether we like it or not. If we like our programming, we can copy and paste, but if we don’t like it, we can delete and start a new program.

It’s up to us, we just have to put in the right input, in order to get the right output. In my case, the bitter bug infected me and I just let that one stew, because I knew it would become my superpower.

Here are some programmed Bitter Friday Giftures made out of dozens of one’s and zero’s to distract you from your Bitter Friday Work that you have to do soon…

It’s been a year…

If I told 27-year-old Bitter Ben that…

I would say that in my late 20’s…

At the most recent movie I watch…

It was a movie called Inside Out 2…

The original movie Inside Out…

Stolen by Hollywood studios…

And also…

What Inside Out taught all of us…

And most of our thoughts…

And that our thoughts are just…

And that the Matrix was right…

ARRGGGHHHHHHH

Bitter We’ve been Programmed Ben