Surprise!

Even though I have plenty of projects I am currently trying to work on, the back of my mind has been entertaining itself fitting bits and pieces together into another. Over the last few days, I've caught a glimpse or two of what it was working on.

The setting is dystopian. Huge corporations do whatever they want to do, in order to make another buck. The rich higher officials of those corporations are hardly even aware of the workers who actually do the work, and don't give it a second thought when given the opportunity to cut jobs, ship jobs some place where they payroll would be cheaper, or even replace workers completely with automation. They own so many politicians that laws don't get passed without their approval first. In fact, politicians don't get elected without their help. Meanwhile, the middle class shrivels as prices go up and salaries stagnate or even shrink. It gets so bad, even those families who manage to keep two full-time jobs are homeless. City streets - and even small towns - become war zones because working hard and being good people doesn't get anybody anywhere. They have to fight to keep what they have, and fight even harder to get what they want.

What is going on? I don't like dystopian works; I find them depressing, and I fight my own depression every day, so why inflict more of it on myself? I don't like books/movies/tv shows with 'a cast of thousands', as I find it impossible to sort out who is whom. I don't like political intrigue; it all boils down to greed, and I like to think that some people have other motivations than that. I hate the idea that working hard gets you nowhere.

This plot had everything I hated. Why would my subconscious even consider such a story?

And then it dawned on me. It wasn't. I'd been paying some attention to the nightly news lately, and my subconscious was on overload: Welcome to the modern world.